TRIÁNGULO DE AMOR BIZARRO - Mi catedral

Having now clocked up twenty-two years of honourable service and won over international fans ranging from My Bloody Valentine (who picked them to open some of their shows in Spanish-speaking countries) to Peter Hook (which must be quite gratifying for them), Triángulo de Amor Bizarro are regarded as veterans of the Spanish alternative rock scene. Back home, the release of "Mi catedral", the seventh album by the Galician outfit led by Isabel Cea and Rodrigo Caamaño, has been anticipated with the kind of build-up reserved for major events.

After 2023's "Sed", the band's most distortion-saturated and aggressive record, it was hard to guess which direction TDAB's noise pop would take this time round. Truth be told, it's still hard to say even after listening to "Mi catedral", an album that, rather than pursuing a single inflection, scatters kaleidoscopic influences and ideas across twelve tracks. It's therefore a disjointed and at times chaotic record, but also one that confirms the full range of possibilities the band can draw on, and their immense skill in handling each and every one of them.
While the opener "Smt en el palacio real", after a vaguely melancholic piano incipit, unveils a formidable noise firepower, "Diosas adolescentes" and the anti-generational anthem "Odio a mi generation" (both sung by Cea and rich in synthetic detail) briefly place the album on a par with the fuzzed-out little tunes of Teenage Fanclub and early Los Planetas.
After taking over vocal duties on "Media vida", Rodrigo Caamaño delivers a deranged spoken-word pièce titled "Matar a un rey", stuffed with hyper-saturated violins and progressive synth lines. While "En la corte del E." puts shoegaze (admittedly in a symphonic sense of the term) back at the centre of the village, "Este contra oeste" reopens sonic hostilities in a tense battle between the two vocalists.

"Pat a trenca" (a Galician expression meaning "at breakneck speed") is a very free cover of Nirvana's "Something In The Way", one that takes its initial homage to Kurt Cobain's aching chords and sends it soaring into a liberating symphonic crescendo.
The pop-leaning closer "Sacrificio" shows us that Triángulo de Amor Bizarro's cathedral wasn't built in a single era or out of a single kind of brick. It's more a sonic collage of all the materials the band love and have mastered, shaped and put on display together for the first time in a mausoleum that's sometimes a touch brazen in how it jumps from one style to another, but is always focused and captivating.

Shoegazers with little grasp of Spanish shouldn't be put off: the nostalgia and sonic power of "Mi Catedral" leap over every language barrier and could serve as the perfect gateway into one of the most interesting careers in the genre this millennium.

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08/08/2026