Cadena Perpetua and Buscando Salidas, the band’s first two albums, kept coming back to me while listening to El Disco Negro. Not because they are trying to sound like 1995 or 1997 again. There is a similar sense that very little gets between the band and the song.
The album has no official title. Eleven songs, a black cover, and material recorded over several years. “Muertos Vivos” appeared in 2018 and “Desdudame” in 2022, but neither feels pasted onto a newer record.
The production reminds me more of punk records from the late 1990s and early 2000s than of a rock record made in 2026. It is compact and direct. Hernán Valente (El Vala) has said they spent many hours looking for the sound they wanted. You can hear that work, but you can also hear a band playing together.
The Jam influence has always been easy to hear in Cadena. Melody never softened the urgency of the songs, and the lyrics developed a sensitivity of their own. Cadena have always written about politics, the street and life, with particular attention to what happens in Argentina. In “Relaciones Peligrosas”, they touched on problematic medication use, something I can hardly remember another punk band addressing so directly. And musically, at the very least, they make your foot move.
Cadena’s records are good, but live they hit much harder. There is a communion with the audience that many bands never manage to build. That is even more striking now that Vala and Damián Biscotti (El Chino) live in Europe, while Eduardo Graziadei (Edu) and Santiago Almeida (Sam) remain in Argentina. Every time they play together, that unity seems stronger. They look happy onstage, and the audience feels it. Distance changed the logistics, not the chemistry.
The first time I saw them was at Cemento in 2004, during the Malas Costumbres shows, with 448 from Tucumán, the Marín brothers’ band, hugely important in northern Argentina, and Mamushkas. I also want to use this space to remember Mamushkas’ Tomy Loiseau, who died in 2019. Tomy forever. You will always be part of our memory.
More than twenty years after that first show, Cadena are touring Argentina, including a show on October 10 at Movistar Arena in Buenos Aires, alongside Die Toten Hosen.
Their decision not to release the album on streaming platforms, using their own app and physical formats instead, follows the same idea: keeping the sound and the relationship with listeners in their own hands.
El Disco Negro needs time. I do not think it is a record to understand completely after two listens. Years from now, it may work as a photograph of this moment and be valued alongside their best records. Hopefully, when we look back, some of these lyrics will describe things we managed to leave behind rather than a world that stayed the same.
It is always a pleasure when a band as good, and above all as sincere, as Cadena Perpetua releases a new record.
Tracklist
- Revanchas
- Complicidad
- Attentii Al Cane
- Amor Underground
- Desdudame
- Diferentes
- Tango El Marulo
- Sospechosa Ingenuidad
- El Espectáculo De La Privacidad
- Muertos Vivos
- Nuevos Aires
Cadena Perpetua online
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