Diles Que No Me Maten

Using improvisation to tunnel through the corpus of rock ’n’ roll and emerge with something surprising, Diles Que No Me Maten is at the psychedelic vanguard of Mexico City’s teeming music scene. A decade ago, brothers Gerardo and Raúl Ponce Ramirez were writing skeletal songs with guitar and drums when they decided to expand on the idea, recruiting bassist Andrés Lupone and guitarist Jerónimo Elizondo-García. They found a singer through a local radio show, where Jonás Derbez—the son of Mexico musical mainstay Alain Derbez—would play his own music and read his own poetry. Their gnarly 2020 debut, Edificio, rumbled behind a heavy Motorik engine, its songs suggesting Dead Meadow dosed on the Stooges and Harmonia. The slower strains steadily grew more pronounced, especially on 2023’s remarkable Obrigaggi, where incantatory vocals anchored “Cuando el sueño se rompió” while the title track moved with the slow burn and half-whispered vocals of neo-soul.

But their true breakout was 2026’s Escrito en Agua, named for the inscription on Keats’ tombstone and dedicated both to late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and the Mexican mythological star of artists, Tunuwame. “People are paying more attention to our music,” Derbez told The Fader just before it was finished, “so we dare more to play quiet and low.” Indeed, Escrito is full of the band’s slowest burns yet, from the brooding twinkle of the instrumental “4 kilómetros dentro de un túnel” to the desperate repetition of “No Me,” where guitars circle drums as if caught in a permanent existential sigh. These songs are elliptical, full of spaces that can be cracked open and explored. Diles often steps onstage without a setlist, following their instinct and the room’s energy into and out of mutated versions of these songs in real time. Big Ears 2027 will mark a rare appearance for Diles Que No Me Maten in the American South.