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Dolores de Huevos: Mexican Pop Punk Stars Return to DIY

The former members of Allison open up about scaling back and recording in a parking garage.

Dolores, aka Dolores de Huevos (translation: pain in the balls), is a punk supergroup from Mexico City. All of the members have played in notable Mexican pop punk bands, including Allison. Allison is the Mexican version of a pop punk boy band, like if Blink 182 was comprised of the members of N’Sync, and has toured the world for years. They played everything from clubs to arenas to European fashion events to Colombian parks filled with tens of thousands of fans.

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With Dolores, the band’s members are taking a step back from the spotlight, and playing music with friends for the sake of playing music with friends. It is more aggressive than their previous bands, taking a turn down the road of hardcore, but there are still pop punk undertones. It’s pretty all over the place. On record, they sometimes sound like Paint It Black, they sometimes sound like Propagandhi, and they sometimes sound like straight up rock and roll.

In the interview below we discuss cutting a record in a Mexico City parking garage, putting out your own music even though you’re a superstar, and jumping while you’re playing on stage.

Noisey: Name, age, instrument?
Manuel: I’m Manuel, I play the drums, I’m 33 years old.
Christian: Christian. How do you say “beets?” I like beet juice.
Manolin: My name is Manuel, Manuel two. Or Manolin. I do vocals and guitar. I’m 30. My favorite juice is carrots, orange, and beets mixed together.
Christian: My name is Christian, I play guitar. I like juices and hoppy beers.
[someone who is not actually] Conrado: My name is Conrado and I play bass. I like apple juice. [Laughs]

Where is Corrado? He’s still in the band, yeah?
Manolin: Yeah, he had a photo shoot with some sort of photographer. He had a shoot today for some jewelry for a friend. He’s 27 maybe.

What does everyone do for work?
Manolin: I do video, photo, and also build sets and carpentering. Some mechanics.
Christian: I also play in another band called Austin TV. And I also do tattoos.

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Manuel, what’s your studio called?
Manuel: En Finito.

It’s just you?
Manuel: And a friend. We also have another band called Finde. I play the drums. We record mostly, like, punk. Rock and punk.

Are there a lot of places to record in Mexico City?
Manuel: There are basements, there are apartments, or maybe there are just parking garages or big studios. There are a lot. Tiny, big, medium.

Tell me what it was like recording in a parking garage. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that.
Manuel: We recorded that EP in three days, maybe. You go in the street, you are outside the Tacubaya metro. You see a big ramp, make a right, get in this jail door, and there they are. A lot of cars parked. It worked! This guy that is in charge of the garage let us in. If you go to the end of the parking lot, there’s this crappy bathroom. Just a kind of half of a toilet, some water to wash your hands in a bucket, that’s it. Upstairs it’s this shooting practice room. I think a guy has a gun, and he shoots the billboards. If you go to the right, there’s this big room, at the end of the parking lot, and they have some acoustic materials and stuff. They used to have a recording studio there, but now they don’t. We were the last band to record there. There were not many bands that recorded there. Maybe five. They let us do it at night, because you cannot go in the middle of the day.

So how did this band start? Someone told me it’s a supergroup.
Manolin: Yeah, I think so. That’s what some people said because we come from the Dream Team. We’re very nice people.
Christian: Because we’re dreamy. We are always having beautiful dreams. We share it and people know. That’s why we are the Dream Team. It feels like going to sleep. I
Manolin: We had recordings scheduled, but we kept sleeping. That’s why they call us The Dream Team.

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Do you guys all have, like, the same dreams at the same time?
Manolin: We’ve tried. We have to concentrate. It’s like, “let’s meet us at that point.” And sometimes we can do it. But it’s weird. Faces change. So you have to ask a lot of questions to know if it’s really Manuel or if it’s crazy, you know?
Christian: It’s like the “Inception” movie. Yeah, it’s like all of a sudden you’re dreaming that you’re having sex with Manuel and then all of a sudden it’s Manolin a second later.
Manolin: “What?! You told me you were Manuel!”

So how’d the band start?
Manolin: Well, we’re just like a band of friends. “Let’s make some music. I feel like I’m having some good ideas and let’s put it out together.” For years we felt this urge to play together, when we would meet from time and time.
Christian: We all played in different bands before, and we met because of that. We’re very good friends, and we couldn’t see each other as much as we wanted. Every time we would see each other we would say, “we should play some music.” We got together just to jam, and finally, after ten years or more, this opportunity came. Manolin wanted to play some songs he had and wanted to do a band right away, and started to unite people he thought were good or important.

You guys used to play in other, bigger bands that toured a lot. And then what happened—you just wanted to play with your friends?

Manolin: Yeah, that’s it. We had a very rushed time in our lives when punk rock music scene got mainstream. Everybody had that chance to make a lot of records and money. There were a lot of people that wanted to invest and see the music. The underground music scene was getting very popular. It was good! It was good, too, that a lot of bands had the chance to tour and leave for that. Just for a couple of years or whatever. It was nice. At this point, we just feel like making music because we like it. Like, when you go to a bar and drink a beer with a friend for fun. Well, let’s do music. We can express ourselves and have a nice conversation through our instruments, so let’s put that together, you know? Let’s chill. It begins to feel like a therapy, you know? It was really a moment and space that we’re really open in our minds and feelings and hearts and everything. So we just started making songs, and suddenly we had our first six-song EP that we recorded at the fifth rehearsal that we had. We had a friend come to the rehearsal and say, “hey, you guys have really good songs. You wanna go to my studio in a parking lot and record it? Maybe you can rehearse there so your neighbors don’t get disturbed today.” At the beginning, the rehearsal place that we had wasn’t in that good of an acoustic shape. So we took that chance and we recorded this first EP. It was really awesome. It wasn’t even a month and we had some really good stuff going on. People motivated us and said, “the things you’re doing are really great!” We felt it. It was really authentic and spontaneous, man. It was not hard to put things together.

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So you guys just shit it out?

Manolin: Yeah! And then we started making more songs and more songs. We recorded another record, nine songs. It was good. We are not stopping on that. We are planning on touring, and seeing what happens. It’s just for us to keep expressing ourselves and making music together as friends. If that gives us the chance to have vacations together as friends in other countries, that’s fucking nice.

Christian: We also played at The Fest in Florida. It’s a very nice festival.

Manolin: We got to play that maybe because we had these members. They have this history, this background. I think that this also opened up big doors for us to play where we like.

Tell me what it was like putting out this new record. You guys self released it, right?
Manolin: It was totally independent stuff from the beginning. Recorded by us, by Manuel and his other friend at the studio. We also, with our own savings, made the packaging. We did it step by step all by ourselves. You have to do everything. Not the other way around. In a place we make the CD, in another place we make the paper. We bought the paper first, then we took it to the press. Then we took it to another place to cut it, then paste it. Then we took it to another place to put the wrapping stuff. The thing is, we did it that way because it was the cheapest. If you took it to a place to do it, they do everything by themselves, it’s a lot more expensive.

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In the US we would call that the “labor of love,” when you do everything because you care about it. you know?
Manolin: Exactly. We’ve been doing this since we’ve been playing in bands in the 90s or whatever. You figure out how to put your record out or give it to your friends. With that experience, we know a lot of places where they know us from a long time ago. They are nice to us, so we know about papers and materials and prices. We can do it, you know? That’s also something we learned along the path. Why don’t we do it? It could be easy being from bands that being huge here in Mexico, and maybe just give it to our label, and say, “we are super fucking stars” or whatever, “put us out.” That’s not the point. The point is to make some songs, record it, then feel your record in your hands since you did it since zero. Then make another one.

Dolores means “pain?” I thought Dolores was a name.
Manolin: It’s also a name. Like, an antique name. I knew some friends that I really miss, they play in a band and they tell me that in San Francisco they have a park named Dolores.

That’s where everyone gets fucked up in San Francisco.
Manolin: They fucked you there?
Christian: No. I hope.
Manolin: We should play there. Dolores Park.

Is there an overarching theme to your band?
Christian: We try to talk about personal things. Thinking of humans as a whole. Trying to talk about it, and trying to understand how we react to things and how we are as human beings. It has good things and bad things. We’re trying to deal with it, trying to express it through music. If you go to a live show, we also try to explain that thing with our bodies, not only with our music. There’s a lot of body motion going on, I think that’s why some people think we’re theatrical.

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A lot of jumping and stuff?
Christian: Yeah. Jumping. Shaking. We improvise a lot. We’ll be playing this song, and sometimes Manuel starts playing this other thing. We’re like, “okay!” We don’t say, “stop, okay?” We’ll start doing another thing completely different than what we were supposed to do at that moment.
Manolin: We are just having a fucking good time, you know? We are not trying just to sound as good as our record.
Chris: Just as good as the moment asks for. There are moments in which Manolin starts speaking a lot of things that go through his mind at that moment. I think that’s awesome because every time you go to a show it’s different. Even I am like, “perfect.”

What’s next for Dolores?
Manolin: There’s a lot of things. Some shows. There’s a lot of people that are inviting us to play. Now that they know that there’s a new record coming out, people got excited about it. That we are not a band for one EP and that’s it. At the beginning of the band, we pretended to make the band for just that show. We played that show, when we recorded that EP, and we gave free shirts with the EP and everything. Just for that show. We were the first band and nobody knew who we were. A lot of friends were like, “man, why you already played when we came up here just to see you guys! I heard one song!” We said, “okay, man. There’s a lot of people that came here to see us, so let’s play again.” That same day, the same show. We were the first ones, and the last ones.

Did you play the same set?
Manolin: No, different. But it was good. We just made that for that gig. That’s it. People started saying, “you guys should play more.” So we decided to do it. We have a good time. I think now a lot of people are afraid to make a band because of the commitment, you know? They think they have to leave everything they have. If we’re gonna play together, we’re gonna play together. We don’t have to have that type of commitment. If you want to come play, let’s play. If you come to rehearsal tomorrow, it doesn’t matter. So the band starts. I don't know. All the time, we have things in our minds.

Anything else you guys wanna say?
Manolin: Support your local scene! Good people.
Christian: All of our social media is called Dolores De Huevos.
Manolin: Support laughing. Support crying. Support dreaming.
Christian: Support dreaming. Support sleeping. Maybe we will meet there.