A Band of Bitches is getting political…
The masked Mexican alternative group has released the single “El Diablo Güero,” a pro-immigrant, anti-Donald Trump song, featuring singer/songwriter and studio owner Victoria Morales.
The funky pop-punk track was recorded to coincide with the current run in Mexican theaters of director Jonas Cuaron’s “migrant thriller,” Desierto, which will be the closing film at this year’s LA Film Festival.
The film, about Mexican workers trying to cross the border to the United States who are pursued in the desert by a murderous American vigilante (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). It stars Gael Garcia Bernal, well-known to American viewers from the Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle.
Morales wrote the bilingual song inspired by the film with Latin Grammy-nominated A Band of Bitches’ member Ushka at Cuaron’s request. “El Diablo Güero” is not, however, part of the film’s original soundtrack, whose layers of ominous and sublime music were composed by Woodkid.
“[Cuaron] sort of felt the need for [another] song that could really capture the entire film,” Morales told Billboard. “El Diablo Güero” was written and recorded in a few days, with production supervised by Cuaron at Morales’ Victoria Records Studio in Monterrey.
A Band of Bitches announced the debut of the new track alongside Cuaron and Morales at the Vive Latino festival in Mexico City; it was released to Mexican radio during the second week after the film premiered in theaters in April. The movie is still playing in Mexico.
The track samples lines from the film that Morales says had the most impact on her, particularly the words “welcome to the land of the free” spoken during one chilling scene.
Although journalists in Mexico have pointed out that the title could be a reference to Trump and his statements about Mexican immigrants, Morales maintains that it was the film’s American killer who inspired the song.
“In the end everyone is going to hear what they want to hear and make their own interpretation,” Morales says. “I think that it could become sort of an anthem, because of the relation of what’s happening in the United States and with the elections.”
Desierto is set for a commercial run on the U.S. sometime before the elections. A trailer for the film used an audio clip of Trump’s infamous Mexican “rapists” comment.
Cuaron, the son of Oscar-winner Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity), will next write and direct the Zorro sequel Z, also starring Garcia Bernal.
