ASIA MENOR - Vaho

The so-called nueva escena chilena, which is generating so much buzz right now, actually began well before the arrival of Asia Menor. Still, it's undeniable that it's largely thanks to “Enola Gay” from 2023 — alongside, perhaps, Estoy Bien's “Apoyo Emocional” from the same year — that everyone's talking about it so much. The Temuco band's debut was in fact one of the very first works from the movement to stir up unstoppable buzz across various rating aggregators and draw international attention, ultimately dragging the whole scene along with it. Needless to say, then, how eagerly this follow-up, titled “Vaho”, has been awaited, both in Chile and elsewhere.

If “Enola Gay” was a fully-fledged post-punk revival record, one in which the band wove English-language jingle-jangle influences together with local rock classics of the 1980s (Los Prisioneros chief among them, inevitably), “Vaho” confirms the evolutionary nature of bands from the nueva escena chilena, pushing toward new structures and solutions. In place of the debut's fully-formed songs, “Vaho” offers tracks with blurrier contours and vocal and musical choices that are less linear and more expressionistic.
After all, the record seems marked by themes like denial of problems, procrastination, and the inability to move forward and evolve. In light of subjects like these, even the improbable object pictured on the cover makes sense: a tool built to fix things yet impossible to actually use.

On tracks like “Lo bueno que tiene, lo malo que ignoro” and “Seis lagunas”, rattles shaken relentlessly by the drums, increasingly distorted guitars and the voice of Jorge Scheuermann — more frustrated and theatrical than ever — build an inhospitable, deafening post-rock environment. It's a suffocating industrial post-punk atmosphere that resolves into cacophonous endings, before suddenly thinning out on the following “Metal”, the album's softest suite and thus the closest thing here to the songs on “Enola Gay”.
On “Cartas”, Asia Menor add a hypnotic flute to a jammed-up post-punk that lurches forward like a broken toy car; while a coil of blazing guitars turns “Vi al diablo” into a red-hot post-hardcore number.

For the album's final two tracks, Asia Menor are joined by the Narval Orquestra of Santiago-based multi-instrumentalist Andrés Quezada. With the contribution of a genuine small orchestra, the sound of “Vaho” is reorganised in the name of a more evolved, more searing post-rock, reaching results on a par with the best of BC,NR. Across these eight new tracks, Asia Menor have built a powerful, chaotic sound that adorns and heightens Scheuermann's lyrical insights. A sort of inner counterpart to “Enola Gay”, one that captures our own disjointed reactions to the discomfort of modern life described on the previous record.

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22/09/2026