The Warning: Keep Me Fed 
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Mexican sisters The Warning have released a new album with some added boosters in the Production and sharper, more focused songs than previously, will this be the one to send them into Metal stardom and crossover success? MK Bennett listens in.
Gojira’s appearance at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics 2024 was an unexpected but welcome addition to the usual over-eager choreography and peaco*cking patriotism of the rest of the field, an entirely lovely bit of Prog- adjacent Rock and another chapter in the constantly evolving lineage of Heavy Metal, barging into modern culture, politely as ever and demanding its slice of respect.
Metal, much like Hip-Hop is generally an immediate music, not because it lacks depth but because as a rule, its brilliance lies on the surface, whether riffs or beats, lyrics in your face, bass drops or big drums. Modern Metal is an amalgamation of five decades of fine-tuning and exploration, both inner and outer space. If we accept the first Sabbath album from 1970 as the Big Bang, then that’s a lot of water under a lot of bridges, a huge amount of material. The branches lie deep too. Kerrang TV (RIP) rarely showed much metal, preferring to amass itself around early Noughties Emo and Pop Punk, reasonably heavy but hardly Metal. The culture itself changes and what we accept under the umbrella grows ever wider, because, without that growth, a thing remains stagnant and stuck in the past.
The story of Modern Metal runs parallel to the story of our accelerated technology, the evolution of the ease of access, MTV when it played music, the internet and the rise of home computers, Napster etc., right through to Spotify. A band like The Warning, a brilliant band from Monterrey, Mexico, now have the same relative options as any band from London or California. Not that the Villareal Velez sisters are new or novices, having been a band since 2013 and released a ton of music already, but with the fifteen videos they have made, YouTube was the obvious path, the music and aesthetic both winning immediate attention, love and support.
This most recent album, Keep Me Fed, with its Art history cover, is a little step up from previous records, a little more sheen in the production, with that Modern guitar sound that is like a plane decelerating, like a rhino about to charge, a comfortable seat in the Large Hadron Collider. The absolute brilliance here is the way they have mixed classic licks and riffs with that production, to make it sound at once familiar but slightly out of step, as they likely took a different route to get here than most.
Track One, Six Feet Deep is a monster driving a tank, a deeply heavy but still catchy riff, bass on the verse, and a chorus big enough to snare a shark in, it’s a great start and features some excellent lyrics too. Sick is a Nuggets-type garage band sing along with massive chords, and again that production, like a ship launched into troubled water.
Apologize is a great chugging muted beauty, technically excellent and very much annoyed, in tone, vocally and musically, possibly a giant f*ck Off to internet trolls, a sensible message we can all get behind. Que Mas Quieres (What Else Do You Want?) may mean more to the band personally and that’s why it is sung in their native language, though you don’t need to be an expert linguist to understand the feeling being expressed.
The lyrics are almost thematic throughout, because while the words could easily be about love and relationships taken at face value, it is just as likely that the Stand Tall against the World attitude comes from Three Young Women Dealing with Sexism, Racism, Xenophobia and god knows what other horrors in the music business in the year of our Lord 2024 because from Colonel Tom Parker to Scooter Braun, nothing ever changes but the colour of the money.
MORE is a stomper, a great big Shirley Manson/Garbage type affair, designed for a stadium, a festival or anywhere people congregate to express joy, while …Escapism is slightly more downbeat but with another major chorus and a realisation. This is The Warnings version of Metallica’s Black Album, it has been polished with an attention to detail that’s rare, from the “ah ah’s” in …Escapism to the extra backing in almost every hook, there’s a spring in the step in every song, and an idea, a feeling that this is the one where everything falls into place. While it could be argued that The Black Album is the end of a particular era of Masculinity, a melancholy thing wrapped up in an F1 chassis, Keep Me Fed rattles with all manner of sparked rage, the start of the chapter, with the focus of a Government assassin, never missing the target.
Satisfied is robot rock, in theme and sound, the crushing bass grooves in the verse a sort of clockwork as it rolls into the perfect heavy chorus. Burnout, which like the rest here, always follows the Metal blueprint, right down to the titles, and will happily rock the furniture from your lounge if you play it loud enough for long enough. Sharks is a fantastic upbeat rocker, seemingly zoning in on a specific idea (“It’s the meat that really matters”) but could relate to puberty and growing up in public, with the pleas of “Don’t bleed, don’t bleed” stuck in your head long after the songs finished.
Hell You Call A Dream, apart from being a great title, is another technical highpoint, a catchy, almost commercial song that nevertheless has the guitar sound of a black hole imploding, is followed by equally brilliant Consume (“I wear my skin like the burden it is”), fine and Feminist Modern Metal with some excellent machine effects, and like the others, no hanging around, two verses, three choruses and a middle eight and they’re gone, point made.
Automatic Sun is the last song of twelve, could be about the push and pull of fame and its expectations, but a high point to go out on, another quick-fire chorus and stop-start riff to bring the listener full circle.
Keep Me Fed is, and will remain in the running for Metal/Rock album of the year, and will be recognized as a classic in years to come, for its female rage, for its songs, for whatever you can take from it, whether expressing yourself through violent abandon or reading your first Simone De Beauvoir.
Turn it up though, regardless.
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All words by MK Bennett, you can find his author’s archive here plus his Twitter and Instagram
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