Six months before Spanish quartet Medussa walked into OVNI Estudios in late 2025 to track their fifth LP, they swapped in a different bass player. Pablo Vázquez — Medussa’s original bassist, never fully out of orbit — was back, and he had seven brand new bass parts to write from scratch.
“Mueran las Ideas” is out now on vinyl and digital through Quebranta Records, with co-releases by Conspiración de Iguales, Discos Macarras Records, Four Skulls, Muerte Matar Records, Primitive Noise Producciones, Producciones Tudancas, and Vinilako.
The four-piece — Fernando Navarro and Juan Gutiérrez on guitars, Vázquez on bass, Javi Arias on drums — has spent over ten years drifting from cleaner tones toward heavier, more distortion-led territory.
The Bandcamp blurb calls it progressive post-metal, and from a listener’s seat that reads accurate enough: the record pulls you through riff shifts and dynamic flips without ever dragging, heavy in the right spots without leaning on the genre’s slower habits.
The band, for their part, has a more complicated relationship with the “post” tag.
“Early on, the «post» tag felt like ours, mostly because pretty much every instrumental band carries it around,” they write. “But on the last few records, and especially this one, we have a hard time seeing ourselves there.”
What they’re stepping away from, they spell out plainly:
“The way we understand post-rock and post-metal — sonic landscapes, endless crescendos, guitars dissolving under a wall of effects, almost orchestral textures where everything blurs into one big melody, hypnotic hammering mid-tempos, that one delay-soaked guitar line that breaks everything open — Mueran las Ideas just isn’t there.”
Said with all the respect in the world for the bands doing that work, they add — a lot of those records are clear influences and a real source of inspiration. They just figured they were probably better at something else.
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Something else looks like this: not too many effects, four elements you can clearly hear, each one carrying its own melodic line that still serves the bigger picture.
The riff as the backbone, the way rock and metal do it. No mid-tempos — nothing on the record drops below 120bpm. Crescendos are quick and almost always land on a full-band hit. Dynamics come from riff changes or from cutting between clean and distorted passages. No loops, no synths, just distortion with a bit of delay or reverb.
“In a way, it was something we wanted to find out for ourselves — whether the recipe still works without too many ingredients,” they write. “The bonus is it makes life on stage way easier.”
The way the record got written changed too. Medussa used to spend three- and four-hour rehearsals with everyone in a room, building songs from a small idea and watching them grow in front of them. That’s not the band anymore.
“We’ve been a band for over ten years, and our lives have changed massively,” they explain. Most of the writing now happens at home, on their own, with rehearsals reserved for putting structures together — a working method they began developing during the pandemic and decided to commit to.
It changed what writing actually felt like: “On this record, unlike the early ones, we found ourselves trying to fit a puzzle together rather than painting on a blank canvas.”
The bassist swap six months before the sessions — Vázquez returning after the bass spot had been held by someone else for the previous albums — left a real mark. On those LPs the bass hadn’t been part of the structure during writing, and on this one it wasn’t either. The difference was Vázquez writing his parts late in the process, which pushed the bass into another voice in its own right, flying free and more present in the mix.
Drums and rhythm guitars went down at OVNI. The drums got room to kick, which the band knew they’d need; the rhythm guitars went down with no fireworks afterward — what was played is what you hear.
The other guitars, the arrangements, and the bass were tracked at home, then sent back to OVNI for reamping. Pablo Senator handled the mix. Medussa took more of the production reins this time and pushed for an end result where the post-production didn’t take over. “Direct and raw,” in their own words.
The eight-label co-release behind the record is its own story. Quebranta, Conspiración de Iguales, Discos Macarras, Four Skulls, Muerte Matar, Primitive Noise, Producciones Tudancas, and Vinilako pooled together to put it out on limited vinyl.
Quebranta itself is a non-profit DIY operation where everything that comes in goes back into the next release — and the band, for their part, are clear that labels working that way are a huge part of why underground bands like them get to keep going at all.
A video for “Cadenas” is up on YouTube — for a band working without vocals, that visual side has to do some of the work singing usually does.
“Mueran las Ideas,” in the band’s own words, is a record about learning, about hanging in there, about drawing a new map — and most importantly for them, about still making things together. They’re happy with how it turned out, happy to have Vázquez back, and curious to see what happens on the next one if his stamp is there from the start of the writing instead of arriving late.
“Or maybe it won’t. We honestly don’t know yet. And we love that.”
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