By Andrew Bansal
Heavy metal supergroup De La Tierra brings together four Latin Americans from different walks of heavy music, namely Andrés Giménez of A.N.I.M.A.L. fame as frontman on vocals and guitar, Andreas Kisser of Sepultura on lead guitar, Sr. Flavio of Los Fabulosos Cadillacs on bass and Alex González of Maná on drums. The quartet utilizes the diversity in talent that comes from their combination, and have already released their self-titled debut full-length album via Roadrunner Records. A couple of weeks ago, Andreas Kisser spoke to Metal Assault to discuss this new project in detail. Enjoy the conversation below.
Andreas, it’s good to have you again on Metal Assault. I’m going to mainly discuss your new side project De La Tierra in this interview. First of all, how did the idea for this band come about?
It came from two friends Alex González, the drummer for Mexican ban Maná, and Andrés Giménez who used to be in A.N.I.M.A.L., a band fro Argentina. Alex is a huge metalhead. Of course, Maná is a big pop rock band but he came from the metal cradle. He knows all the bands and plays like a metal drummer very naturally. So, Andrés and Alex wanted to jam some metal tunes, it was as simple as that. That was at least 8 or 9 years ago, but finally in 2012 they decided to go ahead and do something more serious, more than a jam and to put together a band, something real. So they thought of Sr. Flavio of Los Fabulosos Cadillacs for the bass, and I was the last one to be called. I have known Alex for a few years and jammed together with Maná in the past, so he was the one to approach me and I knew the other guys pretty well too. So to be involved in a metal band singing in Spanish and Portuguese was really fantastic. It felt like a great challenge and I accepted it right away. It took a year of exchanging ideas and demos by email. By 2013, we had 16-17 songs to work with and we finally went to Buenos Aires to practice and play together for the first time. We felt the chemistry was really intense and great. We finished ten songs in ten days. It was really quick, and what I also really liked that it was purely a result of four musicians’ simple wish to play heavy metal together, without any manager, sponsorship or anything like that involved. When we had the album recorded, we produced it ourselves and financed everything ourselves, and then we went after the record label, management and all that. The album came out in January. So it was a very nice, interesting process and I was very happy to be a part of it, that’s for sure.
Awesome, man. Being Latin American yourself, have you thought of doing songs in Spanish or Portuguese any time in the past or was it something completely new that came only with this band?
Yeah it was very much a surprise for me. I mean, I knew Alex liked heavy metal and he admires Sepultura, but I never expected to hear that he wanted to do a band in Spanish. That was a big challenge for all of us. Rammstein for instance sing in German but they’re a worldwide phenomenon. They’re a success everywhere and they didn’t have to change their native language like Scorpions, Accept or Sepultura. So, De La Tierra is something new and special in that sense. I speak a little Spanish and it’s cool to have a bit of Portuguese in there as well, so we put both languages and express ourselves in our own language which is much more natural. So I think it’s cool and the idea is to break barriers and not only play for Latin-speaking countries but to build a fan base everywhere in the world. Now we’re going to open for Metallica in South America. The aim is go everywhere and see what we can do.
Language shouldn’t be a barrier, specially in metal, and I think you can take this worldwide.
I think so. That’s the idea, really. Even for a band like Iron Maiden for example, a lot of people don’t understand any of the lyrics but still love them (laughs). The same goes for bands like Queen and KISS. So I think the metal world is more used to that kind of stuff, specially Latin America where a lot of people don’t understand English at all.
So, would you say it’s better to do it in this band rather than trying to incorporate these languages too much in Sepultura?
Yeah, in Sepultura we do have some stuff in Portuguese but it’s usually been only covers, like more recently on our last album we did a cover from a Brazilian band called Chico Science. But we never really wrote in Portuguese, aside from doing it somewhat here and there like on ‘Ratamahatta’ on Roots for instance. So yeah, it’s something different in De La Tierra. We are really embracing our own language and I think it’s different to write as well, of course, because I’ve been so used to writing in English for so many years and now it’s a new thing for me too. It’s great!
You’re saying that the album was recorded very quickly in ten days and you took a year to put together those songs, but was there any material already written before you were asked to join the band?
The writing process began only after the band’s lineup was decided. We took our time with exchanging demos because of course I was working with Sepultura and everybody else was involved in their own bands too.
Musically, are you deliberately aiming to make this different from Sepultura?
I tried everything. I had some riffs that I didn’t use for Sepultura, so I put those on the De La Tierra demos and there was some other stuff I tried to experiment with more to write something different and specific to De La Tierra. But in the end, it was the same routine of writing as for Sepultura. It’s heavy, it’s aggressive, but the mixture of musicians is different, specially the bass player Flavio who’s not a metal player. He brings slap and two-hand techniques into the mix. It’s really interesting and there is a definite factor of giving some real originality to metal in De La Tierra. So it’s really cool. We have the freedom to try and do anything. So it’s heavy and aggressive, but there’s plenty of other stuff in it too.
Obviously you’ll be busy with Sepultura stuff and you’re on tour with them right now even as we speak. What touring plans do you have for De La Tierra and do you think you’ll be able to devote time to it?
Yeah, so far so good! We have time to organize everything in advance. Not only Sepultura but Maná is going to start a new album. Los Fabulosos Cadillacs have a new tour too, and Andrés with his new group Demente. But we have four shows with Metallica in South America and we’ve blocked March and April for De La Tierra only. We’ll have some American dates and that should be announced soon. May be London at the end of April an a festival in Spain too, and even may be do some shows together with Sepultura in the summer, do some festivals in June and July. It will be hard work, but should be fine.
Talking of Sepultura touring, last November you were supposed to do a North American tour but it got canceled at short notice. It was a disappointment for fans here, but what do you do when a tour is canceled? It’s almost like your place of work closing down for a month or something.
Yeah, it’s horrible! We really waited until the last minute before announcing the cancellation to try to make the tour happen. But unfortunately, when we finally had to go through all the visa process and everything, we had to cancel the tour. That was very, very bad for everybody. Now we’re trying to reschedule those dates and hopefully in the second half of this year we’ll be able to go and play. We want to get those dates announced sooner or later because it was a real shame for us. It was towards the end of the year, and of course we managed to play some shows in Brazil, but it was not the same. We wanted to do that North American tour, it was a really cool package too and our new album had just come out at that moment. But it’s not the first time we’ve had problems like that in the United States with working permits. We never got denied, but it was just a bureaucratic process that took longer than we expected.
Visit De La Tierra on the web:
DeLaTierraMusic.com
facebook.com/DeLaTierraMusic
twitter.com/DeLaTierraMusic
youtube.com/DeLaTierraMusic
instagram.com/DeLaTierraOfficial