Representing some of the most exciting and assured guitar music this year, Inés Adam and Martina Nintzel brought their high powered rock show to the UK at Manchester’s Year’s End festival.
With catchy headbangers flavoured by UK indie, their energy onstage is as infectious on stage as it is just talking to them. Each band member bounced off one another in a tour de force of cool with Nintzel falling to the floor as their set ended evoking the drama of a true rock opera. They spoke to us hot off the back of a show that ensured the Deaf Institute lived up to its name.
You’ve been on your European Tour and seen firsthand the music scene here, how does it compare to the scene at home?
MN: Well, it’s in English for starters
[Laughter]
IA: That’s a big one. I think people look great here, they have great style, I feel like that’s a big difference. The way that people behave on stage, they’re crazy young and talented.
MN: I think there’s a lot more personality to people, in Argentina, the scene is either Trap, that kinda vibe, or Rock, we call it Rock Nacional, so it all goes in that direction but here I feel like they’re going to very different parts.
IA: I feel like it’s easier to tell back home who people are inspired by but here it doesn’t feel as boring.
You recently supported Måneskin in Argentina – how did that come about?
MN: Well, a few days before the show we got asked if we wanted to open for Måneskin and we were like sure and that was it.
IA: We had like no time to prepare
Maybe it was better that you only found out a few days before, so you didn’t have time to worry about it.
MN: Yeah, there were 16,000 people there, it was the biggest crowd we played but there were ads in the arena, and I would just be playing and see *McDonald’s*
So, you’ve been doing lots of travelling across the world so how do you stay motivated and stay engaged with performing?
IA: We just practise unplugged even if it’s not perfect
MN: Going on stage with a band, it always feels warm and nice, and seeing even one person who knows your lyrics it’s very shocking. Sometimes you forget you’re not in your country and this isn’t that normal, and people don’t do this usually.
IA: And the lights have strings
[Laughter]
You recently released and album, Freak Scene, what was the experience of making that album like?
IA: It was crazy, we were so young and inexperienced
MN: I mean now we’re old and experienced
IA: Look at us now, we’re oldies. We barely knew each other at all, we were friends already…
MN: I don’t know if you know how we met but I’ll give you the short version. So, we met on Instagram, I had a Strokes fan account and she made Strokes covers and so I followed her, she followed me and a mutual follower of ours was like you should meet up so in the middle of the pandemic we met up, did a cover, the cover went viral on YouTube. People were like, you two look like best friends you have great chemistry, and we were like haha. A year after that we did another cover together and we went to this show and I said, hey we should start a band. Then this Arctic Monkeys cover band invited us to do a show with them playing Strokes covers. They called us Strokes girls and we didn’t like that so that’s when we decided to write our own music. In the middle of all that, I really wanted to go to New York to see the Strokes play on New Year’s Eve which was kind of delusional but I asked if [Inés] wanted to come with me and she was like “No.”
IA: It was because I had a job!
MN: And we didn’t know each other. But because of my fan account, this guy DMed me and was like I have two tickets, one for you and one for Inés and I was like, we have to go. So she quit here job, we raised money for the plane ticket to New York. In New York, we got a gig, at the gig a label scouted us and signed us. So…two little girls…
IA: [Laughs] Two young women against the world!
So, it was all by chance?
MN: Yeah, and we were friendly but not friends, we didn’t know each other that much and we were presented with the option to sign, and we were like, should we sign or not sign? It was a bit of a risk since we didn’t know each other, and we’d only written three songs but we said, how can we not do this? We signed and became friends making the album.
IA: We didn’t have any songs when we went to New York and after we wrote some, we played them live but when we got home we realised, okay we actually have to make an album. I feel like there was this urgency to have our own music so we made it in 6 months. It was really crazy.
MN: In New York, we started getting a following on social media and people were asking for original music and that’s something that doesn’t usually happen. When you make covers and put out your own music, usually people tell you to go back to doing covers. For us we were doing covers and people wanted to hear our stuff and we couldn’t let that moment slide and we didn’t!
You mentioned YouTube – would you say social media has become a bigger part of the music industry?
MN: I think so, I think it’s very useful and has a lot of bad things as everyone knows but it’s how we met, it’s how we got here and we wouldn’t be here if not for social media.
IA: We’re big fans of social media [Laughter] otherwise I would still be at my job and you would be studying biology.
As women in the music industry, you must have faced lots of obstacles in your careers, what kind of issues have you experienced and how could they be resolved?
IA: It’s complicated because it’s not as hard as it used to be so you never want to put yourself in that position of thinking oh this is happening because we’re women but sometimes, it is. There’s always this little doubt that something is happening because we’re women or just because we’re young or inexperienced. I think experience is very useful, with time you can tell if people are treating you wrong.
MN: I think if you stop and think about it too much it gets depressing.
IA: You just have to let it go but I think people like that we’re women playing guitars.
With this being Year’s End Festival, what’s been your highlight of 2023?
MN: This year was crazy because we finished the record, released the record, had our first show and played the arena
IA: We played Primavera Sound too
MN: I think the best thing was just the music of course
IA: Just playing live with a band, this year we played with our band for the first time
MN: This is the eight time we’ve played live ever but the more we play, the more we rehearse and connect, the better it gets and that’s been my favourite part. It’s the thrill of playing like today, we slept very little but we were still excited to play. It feels good.