For most of the spring, Tano!‘s fourth album existed as a stack of boxes hidden in a basement somewhere in Catalonia. The vinyl was pressed, the sleeves printed, and the two people who made it said nothing. “It wasn’t easy to keep it hidden, especially during the last few months, when people were asking us if we were planning to release a new album, while we already had all the vinyl records pressed and packed away in boxes, hidden in a basement somewhere,” the band said. “But we feel that we enjoyed the whole process even more by doing it this way.”
On June 5th, “Danses a la Discòrdia” simply appeared: on streaming platforms, in record shops, and on stage, the same weekend the Girona duo opened a two-day festival for their tenth anniversary. The record came out through BCore Disc, co-edited with Saltamarges, La Agonía de Vivir and Error! Music, wrapped in artwork by Xavi Forné of Error! Design.
The silence was the plan from day one. “From the very beginning, the idea was to carry out the entire recording and editing process away from social media, mainly for two reasons,” they explained.
“The first is that from our point of view it seems a bit absurd to try to follow the standards set by mainstream music when you are an independent, self-managed, or underground band, because we actually come from completely different ideas and aim for completely different results. Obviously, we use the internet as a means of communication, but we feel that nowadays it is perhaps being used excessively. This leads us to the second reason: being able to enjoy and fully experience the “here and now” throughout the whole recording process, without unnecessary distractions or pressure, and only sharing the album with the world once it is 100% finished.”
Tano! are Oskar Garcia (guitars, contraptions and vocals) and Victor Pelusa (drums, keyboards and vocals), together since 2015, when the band formed in the aftermath of Hurricäde’s final tour shows alongside the also defunct Anchord.
Four releases and countless concerts across Catalonia, the Iberian Peninsula and parts of Europe later, they remain hard to file: punk is the engine, but the songs bend through mathematical structures, screamed and sung vocals, and post-hardcore passages, all of it delivered in Catalan. Their last visit to these pages was three years ago, when they walked us through “Intanostellar“ song by song. When we started trading questions with them back in March, the new record was still a secret.
Live, the setup stays minimal: one guitar, one kit, two voices. The low end a duo usually lacks comes out of Oskar’s pedalboard instead, eleven pedals deep, some of them built specifically to make guitar and bass amplifiers sound good at the same time.
The result is a two-piece that fills a room like a full band, snapping between broken rhythmic figures and melody while the lyrics unspool like village legends: vipers at the washhouse, midnight bonfires, old machines waking up.
The songs were tracked in November 2024 across two studios, Cal Pau in St. Pere Molanta with Borja Pérez and Santa Pau in Banyoles with Pep Aymerich, then sent across the Atlantic, where J. Robbins mixed the record at The Magpie Cage in Baltimore in December 2025. Victor Garcia mastered it at Ultramarinos Mastering.
The Baltimore leap came through their label. “One of the most important aspects for us was the mixing, and we had J. Robbins in mind for the job because he’s a reference not only as a musician but also as a mixing engineer. Jordi Llansamà (BCore) had worked with him before, so he put us in touch,” the band said. “The connection was immediate, and J understood exactly what we were going for. One of the things we liked most was the way he works with dynamics and how he gives each part the space it needs without losing the overall energy of the songs. We’re really happy with the final result and we’re having the best feedback from it.”
Whatever travels, the language doesn’t. “Tano! all the lyrics and vocals are 100% in Catalan, unlike some of the other projects we had in the past where we sang in English,” they said. “Singing in your own language is always much better, more interesting, and more enriching. It allows us to express ourselves in a more natural way and gives the songs a stronger identity. For us, singing in Catalan is an added value because it is a way of defending and keeping our language alive.”
Touring outside Catalonia has never been an obstacle; within punk and hardcore circles they have always felt supported. “In mainstream music there is often the idea that singing in a more widely spoken language will help you reach a bigger audience and sell more records. For us that way of thinking is completely ridiculous. And let’s say it, it’s difficult to understand the lyrics when you’re screaming, so we don’t think it makes a big difference in the live shows.”
The band sum the album up in one line: “New evil eyes, algorithmic spiritualism and various arcane dances around the washhouse.” Here is where those dances lead, track by track. The whole thing streams below.
“El Sol es Podreix” (“The Sun Rots”) opens the record, and the duo wanted it blunt in both music and words. “The world feels worse than ever, like history just keeps repeating itself and we never really learn from the past: wars, genocides, turbo-capitalism, deep economic inequalities, climate change, and so on,” they said. “When society stops thinking critically, avoids confronting injustice and fails to respond, everything starts to fall apart. Only the people can save themselves. Now more than ever: power to the people, abolish fascism!” The lyric compresses all of it into a single image: “The prophet is now a drone and it bears your name.”
“L’Escurçó del Safareig” (“The Washhouse Viper”) goes back to the days when daily life happened around the communal washhouse, where laundry and conversation mixed, and where malicious gossip could end with someone burned at the stake for witchcraft. The song itself is a survivor of a different kind. It was written around seven years ago, during the “Cants als Malsons” era, and was supposed to appear on “Intanostellar”. “But for some reason we simply forgot about it. It’s that simple! :) It ended up buried among other recordings of riffs and demo ideas from our rehearsal space,” the band admitted. “One day while going through old recordings, we found it again, and that’s how it finally made its way onto the latest record. We also found a few other finished songs, which gave us the idea of putting together a B-sides album? What we really enjoy is writing new music. It’s hard to explain why we sometimes leave a finished song off a record. Maybe it’s because it sounds different, or because it feels different from the rest of the songs we’ve written.”
“Rèquiem per un Ahir” (“Requiem for a Yesterday”) picks the thread up. “Although this is not a concept album, this song could be a sequel to the previous one. What would happen if someone is accused of witchcraft, it turns out to be true, and in the end they curse everyone? Evil breeds evil,” they said, describing it as a song about how collapse can lead to deep transformation and new beginnings.
“Mal d’Ull” (“Evil Eye”) runs on the old warning that you reap what you sow. Curses, nightmares and shadows fill the verses, and the title of an earlier Tano! release slips into the words themselves: “Cants als malsons aquí ballant”, chants to the nightmares dancing here. “Perhaps the real mystery is not what happens to us, but everything we have refused to see until now,” the band said. The lyric closes the loop: “The wind brings back all that you have sown.”
“Monument” is the song that makes the release strategy read like practice rather than pose. One interpretation targets the glorification of absurdity amplified by social media, which creates references without foundation, driven by spectacle and economic interest. “This destroys any sense of value and reduces our ability to react to and interpret what happens in everyday life. Combined with misinformation and hate speech, it leads us to become increasingly isolated from one another. In short, it makes us dumber; and if we are dumber, we are easier to manipulate,” they said. “The other interpretation would simply be a hymn to celebrate all those things that never happened.”
“La Gran Dalla” (“The Great Scythe”) is about death, and about the mythology humans have always built around it: a separation rather than an ending, with the emotional bond as a bridge between two worlds. In the lyric, two voices speak across a river, meeting at “a bonfire, a midnight ritual, that will burn into infinity”. “Maybe we only learn how to live once we learn how to face the end. Perhaps then, a song about life,” the band said.
“Càntic al Desperta-Llars” (“Chant to the Home-Waker”) is the shortest text on the album and the angriest. “Nowadays we’re facing a serious housing crisis: it’s no longer a right, it’s a luxury. Rents are skyrocketing, wages are frozen, and neighbourhoods have been turned into a business,” they said. The song openly supports squatting, conceived as a chant to a figure, maybe a spirit, maybe a hero, that frees up empty houses so people can live in them or build social activity inside. The whole lyric is one question: “people without homes, homes without people. How can that be understood?”
“Tano Turner” keeps up the band’s tradition of naming every instrumental after a figure of historical or social relevance, filtered through wordplay. “Intanostellar” gave us “Gretano Thunberg” and “Carlos Santano”. This one salutes the great Tina Turner.
“Vella Andròmina” (“Old Contraption”) takes on AI through the lens of the Luddites.
“During the First Industrial Revolution, the Luddite movement went into factories and destroyed machinery to stop machines from taking their jobs and making their working conditions worse,” the band said. “With AI, even though there is some rejection, everything sounds more like “adapt or die”, as if the future were already written and unstoppable. There’s a feeling of losing control in the middle of a global change. Will HAL 9000 from A Space Odyssey end up becoming a reality, maybe we’re still in time to change things?”
There is a private layer to the title too. The album credits list Oskar on “guitars, contraptions and vocals”, and he takes the word seriously. “I love contraptions! I use that word for all kinds of things: old machinery, modern devices, and any kind of weird or interesting piece of gear. But what I love most is anything retro and simple machines,” Oskar said. In musical terms that means synth pedals, harmonizers, octave pedals and reverbs from the 80s through the 2000s, plus delay and frequency filter racks in the studio, and those eleven pedals on stage, all of them in use. “Maybe being surrounded by them is what inspired us to write “Vella Andromina.””
“Jacques Coustano“, the second instrumental, started with two mental scenes: a Tokyo train station at midnight, and something out of Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”.
The name arrived later, on the road. “We love silly games, and the naming of our instrumental songs is one of them. Lots of our friends try to play it, but we’re quite experienced and sometimes it’s difficult for us to be impressed about it,” the band said. “This time, the image of Jacques-Yves Cousteau revealed itself to us as a stencil graffiti on a wall in Annecy (France) just after we played a show while on tour around Europe with Saïm in 2025.
After the concert, we went outside, and suddenly Joan (Saïm’s singer) started laughing for no apparent reason. When we turned around, there was an image of Jacques behind us looking at us, and that was when Joan said the name. Some of the audience who were outside, members of Sport (who came to the concert) and ourselves found it really funny, and right at that moment we decided that it would be the title of a song on the new album. We’ll always remember it.”
“Cus que Cosiràs” (“May You Sew Forever”) puts a foreman’s shout on repeat while a seamstress works without rest, until she transforms into a spider and weaves her own destiny. “Same fucking old story. It doesn’t matter what you do or what you want to do, you always feel like a slave in an endless gear,” the band said. The song deals with labour exploitation as a modern form of slavery, with one way out: disobedience. “In the end, freedom is not given: it’s taken.”
“Un Últim Ball” (“One Last Dance”) closes the album with no guitar and no drums at all, which pushed the two of them out of their comfort zone.
“The idea was to create something that sounded like a pirate tavern orchestra, a piece of music you could imagine being played at the end of the world as a final dance between the living and the dead. We had a lot of fun recording it,” they said. Victor played keyboards, melodica and the goliath, Oskar played ukulele, made to sound like a mandolin in places, and a curtain chime sneaks in among the small touches.
Abdon Compta, who runs the Santa Pau studio, added trombone, and Turbomary (Maria, Calm’s keyboard player) sang backing vocals. The final line of the record name-checks El Birrot, a beer garden run by friends of the band in the Empordà region, where they always seem to end up after tours. “It’s our favourite place to meet friends and have beers that are not easy to find, but it’s kind of far from our area, so we can’t go there as much as we’d like. That makes it even more special and priceless.” So the last image on the album is exactly that: “Like the last sip we took at El Birrot.”
The release date doubled as a birthday party. On June 5th and 6th the duo staged the first Tano!Fest, built from the ground up for their ten-year anniversary.
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“We felt like it would be cool to celebrate it with a small party and try to bring together as many friends’ bands as possible, bands we had shared shows or tours with at some point over the years. When we got in touch with them, everyone said yes straight away, and what started as a small idea ended up becoming a two-day festival,” the band said. “Coming from a DIY mindset, it made the most sense for us to create and organise our own festival. It’s something special for this anniversary, not something we see happening regularly, although we’re already thinking about doing a second edition this autumn…”
