From the heights of the Madrid mountains, with extensive stage experience behind them and a first fabulous self-titled album released in 2021, Veta return with this second conceptual album entitled «Doble negación», which includes ten magnetic tracks, reflective lyrics and a contagious critical energy. Because when ‘no future’ becomes the dominant ideology, when the weariness of nihilism becomes unbearable and when our imagination is only capable of reproducing dystopian scenarios, it is in despair that hope precisely resides. Genuine hope, without sudden conversions to optimisms that ignore doubt and negativity. Hope as a double negation, assuming material negativity from the root but consciously affirming its integration into the projection of futures.
Recorded by the duo themselves at Bordados Sister and mixed by Dany Richter at El lado izquierdo, in the lyrics of these new songs Ana Galletero (Travolta) and Carlos Toronado (PAL) place themselves inside a contradictory struggle between the discouragement produced by the overwhelming present and the desire to learn the necessary hope that would allow us to seize the possibility of overcoming the current state of things. Through the use of organs, synthesisers, drum machines and loops, Veta enter the minimalism of electronic music, krautrock and post-punk to create a crunchy, danceable musical muscle with which they align poetics and politics in a highly personal way.
The album opens with «Contrapaso», the first song composed for «Doble negación», inspired by the work of Ernst Bloch and his principle of hope, whose idea paves the way for the following tracks, such as «Espectros», a beautiful piece about not giving up in bad times, even if only for those who fought before us. Then «Fuera de lugar» plays with the idea of utopia as a non-place, a luminous beyond that we sometimes see as necessary, sometimes ridiculous, and «Telecuerpos» delves into the physical-virtual splitting in which we currently live. Side A closes with the instrumental «Zona de sacrificio», a tribute to the geographical regions that the system needs to devastate in order to keep functioning. Side B begins with two songs whose titles refer to Paul B. Preciado’s «Dysphoria mundi»: «Heroína electrónica» and «Disforia». These are followed by «Enjambre», a song inspired by the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s «Cosmopolis», which seeks to highlight the contrast between the ‘hyper-effective’ psychopaths the system needs and the rest of us, who criticise without doing enough. «Materia» prepares us for the album’s closing track, «Hiperstición»: an energetic, ethereal and beautiful piece that uses this concept —the opposite of superstition— to explore how ideas, especially beliefs and fiction, influence the production of our reality.
