¡Sangre!

“¡Sangre!” runs one of the oldest tricks in rock songwriting: take a single, primal word and repeat it until it becomes both a horror-movie chant and a social x-ray.

I started with the obvious mouths, vampires, mosquitoes, the leech, and then just kept widening the list without ever changing register, surgeons, moneylenders, presidents, dictators. I used the same verb, “sucks,” for the mosquito and for the moneylender on purpose. I wanted the song to refuse to tell you which bloodsucker was the metaphorical one.

The ending is the part that matters most to me. After a whole song of things taking blood, I wanted the final image to be blood given, a transfusion, something that saves instead of drains. It’s a small twist but a real one: the same substance describing exploitation throughout the song is, in its final use, what heals, which quietly reframes everything before it, blood itself isn’t the problem, what’s done with it is.

The punk variant of rock gave me the physicality this needed, letting the song be genuinely fun and cutting at the same time.

With that said, turn up the volume and mosh to “¡Sangre!”