Mexican/American extreme metallers Brujeria have just released a video for their new song Plata O Plomo, taken from the forthcoming album Pocho Aztlan album. We here at Hammer have been fans for a while, so we sat down to have a look…
THE FOLLOWING VIDEO AND IMAGES ARE EXTREMELY GRAPHIC AND NOT SUITABLE FOR MOST PEOPLE
It starts with a television broadcasting a news report, and while not being fluent in Spanish, we can’t actually give you any specifics on what the story is, but the images of blood, dead bodies and severed heads make it clear that it isn’t the ‘hilarious’ final story about a water skiing tortoise.
After 35 seconds some thick bass rumbling kicks the song off and the Brujeria logo pops up on the screen. It should get a bit nicer now, right… right?
49 seconds in and a row of severed heads are lined up against a wall staring back at us, as the band bark away in the background. It hasn’t got any nicer.
We’ve had 57 seconds of quick cuts, each of them a photograph of some disturbing and unspeakably violent thing. And now what looks like an army, all with their faces covered and holding automatic weapons, stare back at us.
Two seconds later and there is a half-naked man sat against a wall with a chainsaw being held to his neck. Fucking. Hell. It can’t get any more disturbing than this, can it?
1 minute and 25 seconds in and the formula has become clearer. As the band pound through a groovy yet brutal chorus, the images that pop up seem to rotate from either piles of money, drugs or guns, to people being held in police custody, to something really gruesome.
At 1 minute and 34 seconds it’s another naked corpse, but this time with loads of massive fucking knives sticking out of it. He looks like a really lengthy game of Pop Up Pirate… are we becoming desensitised to this shit?
1 minute 45 seconds. More severed heads. Just in the road this time. Lovely.
At exactly two minutes there is a shot of a roomful of naked, headless torsos. So that’s whose heads they were!
The next 20 seconds or so feel like a welcome break – it’s mainly shots of guns, gang members posing with guns, a lady holding a gun, big palettes of drugs, guns and guns. It’s genuinely the nicest bit of the video so far.
Possibly the most unsettling image of the entire video appears at 2 mins 41 seconds. It is of an unbelievably youthful face, cut from the shoulders and lying in long grass. This is getting way too much now.
At 3 minutes and 2 seconds the television pulls back, and with the gory images still flickering away, the band lock into a groove and we hear the band talking in Portuguese to what sounds like a very scared, very tied up individual.
There’s a pretty lady in her pants holding a massive fuck-off bazooka at 3 minutes and 32 seconds. It feels like she’s in the wrong video.
Another lady, also in her underwear, has her bottom out and an automatic rifle over her shoulder at 3 mins 59 seconds. Too late to go down the Steel Panther route now, lads.
And then, mercifully, it’s over. It’s one of the most shockingly grotesque and brutal videos in the history of metal. Feel free to have a watch for yourself, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Brujeria’s new album Pocho Aztlan is out September 16, via Nuclear Blast.
