Akriila and Hesse Kassel sound nothing alike. Chile made them both.

Akriila's second album went up on 3 September. By the next morning the RateYourMusic board had a thread open about how high it would land and how far it would fall once the casual ratings caught up with it, which is the specific compliment that site pays to records it has decided to take seriously. Nobody in the thread seemed surprised that it was Chilean. That is the part worth stopping on.

Because two months earlier the same forum had been arguing about a record with almost nothing in common with this one: six tracks of Santiago art-punk, a fifteen-minute opener, saxophones, no chorus anywhere.

What happened in October 2019

The shorthand is the estallido social. Fare-dodging protests in the Santiago metro turned into the largest demonstrations Chile had seen since the dictatorship, and then the pandemic shut everyone indoors with the argument unfinished. The generation that had been making careful, pretty indie pop stopped.

Bandcamp Daily's scene report on Chilean rock quoted one of the musicians in it saying that distortion and intensity were back in a big way, that they decided to play loud and scream and let everything out. You can hear the decision in the records. The interesting thing is that it did not produce one sound. It produced a scene that split cleanly in two and got better at both halves.

The loud half

Hesse Kassel are a Santiago six-piece and Morir Saltando came out on 15 July through Amuleto. It runs a shade under 45 minutes across six tracks, opens with fifteen minutes called "Pornomiseria", and hands a lot of the record to Renatto Olivares talking rather than singing.

Every English-language write-up reaches for Fugazi, Swans and black midi, and those are all true enough to be useless. What is actually distinctive is the register: this is a band that treats spoken Spanish as the lead instrument and lets the horns and the breakdowns argue underneath it. Their 2025 debut La Brea had the same ideas with worse editing. This one knows exactly how long to hold something before it turns into a bit.

Around them is a whole circuit that never gets exported. Segunda Mordida has been running the label Medio Oriente out of Santiago since 2016 and told The FADER last month that the city has no dedicated DIY venues, so shows happen in warehouses and, at one point, an abandoned train station in Quilicura. Sello Fisura and Joy Boy Records put out the paranoid end of it: Maifersoni, Dolorio & Los Tunantes, El Cómodo Silencio de los Que Hablan Poco.

The digital half

Akriila is Fernanda Sepúlveda Tapia, born in 2003 in Maipú, on the western edge of Santiago. She started recording during the pandemic into a microphone in her mother's car, put "Dando Vuelta" online in 2020, released the mixtape 001 in 2023 and her first album epistolares in August 2024. This year she turned up on a major, with umru on additional production and Jane Remover singing on "suave".

It would be easy to file her as the exception, the one who left the underground for a label. She is not. She is the same story told with a laptop: nobody in a room, nothing to lose, no producer explaining which of these five ideas is the single. She has plenty of company in that, which is roughly the subject of our new guide to albums one person made alone.

What makes the album work is that the chaos is arranged rather than dumped. It moves between reggaeton and something close to shoegaze inside single songs, and the transitions are the point. The people calling it messy are describing the surface accurately and the structure not at all.

The half that is not in Santiago

The most radical Chilean record of the last two years came from neither camp. Mawiza formed in 2021, changed their Spanish name because it no longer fit what they were doing, and went back and re-recorded their old material in Mapudungun, the Mapuche language.

Ül arrived on 18 July 2025 through Season of Mist. The title means chant. Nine tracks calling for the protection of Mapuche land, played on a mix of native instruments and a very modern metal rig, with Joe Duplantier of Gojira screaming over the closer. Metal Hammer called them the most important new metal band of 2025 and that is not the hyperbole it looks like: singing this music in a language the Chilean state spent a century trying to erase changes what the riffs are for.

Look past Santiago and the scene keeps going. Valdivia, Temuco and Concepción all have their own version of this, which is why the country's output does not sound like one movement being copied outward from a capital.

The lineage nobody in the thread mentioned

None of this is new behaviour. Chile's most famous band made pop under a dictatorship, in a suburb, on a shoestring.

La voz de los '80 came out in 1984, when Los Prisioneros were three kids from San Miguel writing about the country they were stuck in, and it still sounds like it was made with the door shut. If you want the same trick performed elsewhere in South America, our guide to Tropicália covers the Brazilian version.

The link between 1984 and now runs through the 2010s indie generation that today's bands grew up on and mostly reacted against.

Niños del Cerro's Nonato Coo (2015) is the sound of that older, softer Santiago, and it is still a lovely record. So is Chini.png's El día libre de Polux, which sits between the two eras and belongs to neither.

Where to start

If you want the argument in two records, play Morir Saltando and then Akriila back to back and listen for the same city in both. It is there, and it takes a few passes to hear. If you want the one that will still matter in ten years, it is Ül.

Rate them, and argue about Akriila in the comments. The people calling that album a mess have a real case, and it deserves writing down.