LA URSS

13. The fateful number becomes fortunate when it comes to celebrating the years of the best and most genuine active Spanish Punk band. La URSS, of course. A name that, as they themselves argue “Represents many things that are worth not forgetting, such as the pompous aesthetics of power, totalitarianism, mass control, bureaucracy, hermeticism, wars, prisons, rubble of glory, disappointments, forgotten victims … “. La URSS have just published their fourth studio album “Nuevo Testamento” (which, curiously, is the title originally chosen by The Clash to sign its most emblematic work, finally baptized “London Calling”). Two constants define La URSS since its birth in late 2005 in Andalusia: their iron fidelity to a purely punk identity (understood this through a large variety of records that span from London Punk from 76-77, the Californian scene that followed –with Dead Kennedys at the head-, the after-punk that emerged at the dawn of the 1980s on both sides of the Atlantic, and, above all, the classic Iberian Punk tradition, among other influences that they take as their own and update as nobody has done before in the new century in our country), and a marked and recognizable personality of their own: nobody sounds like them and although their profile in the media has always been low given their purely DIY philosophy, in which they did not find a place to promote themselves in the usual channels, have influenced a lot of new bands close to punk both in Latin America and in Spain, some of them with relative success.

In 2010, after a couple of singles and their first LP, they decided to start controlling all aspects of the band and create La Corporación, their own label that is more than a platform for self-publishing where, in addition to their own albums, they begin to edit and organize shows in different parts of the national geography supporting similar bands from both the national and European and international underground scene, serving as a node and creating around them a microscene from which they were not the only beneficiaries and appealing to absolute self-management. But if something has characterized the Andalusian group, making them stand out far above any other contemporary band to them, it is undoubtedly their inexorable desire to go further and offer, always a version of themselves better than the previous one: live, they show more and more emphatic in each performance, and their recordings have been progressively enriched by greater versatility and complexity, by more effective arrangements (adding elements of the Andalusian musical tradition to punk discourse, for example), and now, a certain production effort by Joaquín Pizarro, who together with thems, has managed to provide the band with a sound much more robust and faithful to what they represent live than in previous recordings. After touring the peninsula countless times, and completing four tours over the European continent, and three other tours over the USA, La URSS allied with Humo and returned to the studio to sign their fourth and most ambitious long-term to date: “Nuevo Testamento”. An album that opts since its publication to occupy a prominent place among the best Spanish punk albums in History and that is that although this text does not seem more than a promotional hyperbole, from HUMO, we can not be more proud than what we consider The best punk band in our country in years, in addition to colleagues and friends, have trusted us for the edition of their new album and it is that few bands endure so many active years and fewer bands born in adolescence, with your friends, getting around through life, distances and always putting the band in first place year after year, record after record, always walking forward and betting everything on music, their music, without giving importance to the repercussion, wasting authenticity and always remaining firm to the idea of ​​creating for the pleasure of doing it. For the pleasure of making it yours, without asking permission