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SOGA are an integral part of Mexico City’s music scene, providing the connective tissue between the sounds of first generation punk, friendship, feminism, and the urgency of hardcore. The band began life in 2018, releasing a stunning demo that sent us into a frenzy of excitement. Such scrap and power. We could not wait to hear what came next… With some time to steep and a slight personnel shift, the resulting ‘Corrosión’ is a ferocious hardcore inferno of a proper debut album. Twelve songs bursting with rage pointed at what they’ve witnessed first-hand that is wrong in their home country: disappearances, mass graves, femicides, male oppression, societal expectations towards women, gentrification, right-wing bigotry, and international corporation violence towards the land and resources.
Our take: We named the demo tape from Mexico City’s SOGA Record of the Week when Iron Lung Records pressed it to vinyl back in 2019, and six years later the band is back with their long-awaited proper debut. Six years is a long time (actually, seven since the cassette version came out) and SOGA has gone through some lineup changes, but everything we loved about that demo shines just as brightly on Corrosión. In particular, Corrosión’s earthy, organic sound feels like an antidote to the meticulously quantized, stylistically belabored hardcore that dominates the discourse around the genre these days. SOGA’s music feels immediate, raw, and from the gut, just like hardcore should. The songs have so much variation in style and mood, with frantic rippers like “La Respuesta” and “Poseseión,” driving and hooky songs like the bass-driven “Gracias Por La Explicación,” moodier songs that bring in elements of post-punk (fans of Tozibabe will particularly love these tracks), and others like “El Himno Desentonado De Una Nación Moribunda” that put melody in the foreground. SOGA has a great dynamic as an ensemble, with the rhythm section generating a beefy groove that allows the guitarist to depart frequently from power chords, squeezing in swaggery lead parts that sound like the mutant child of Greg Ginn and Johnny Thunders. The bassist and guitarist share vocals, and while they have similar styles of shout-singing, alternating between and doubling up the vocal parts adds a lot of dynamism to these tracks. The production is also great (to my ears at least)… very warm and analog-sounding, with what sounds like a subtle fog of tape hiss enveloping the group. While Mexico City is a long way from Eastern Europe, I feel like people who love the moody, intense, and musically adventurous hardcore that came from behind the Iron Curtain in the 80s—see, particularly, the Hard-Core Ljubljana compilation—will love everything about SOGA. Corrosión is the sound of a band firing on all cylinders, though, so even if you aren’t steeped in the genre’s history, it’s easy to get swept up in SOGA’s passion and energy.