Monthly Metal #9
It’s July, and we've got our first track in Spanish, a full retro music player about to land, while the social media platforms are still trying to make sure you never see any of it. Business as usual for Pink Paradox, then. Let's go!
No Cuentes Conmigo is out now
We dropped No Cuentes Conmigo a week ago, on July 17, and it's still on repeat over here, so if you haven't heard it yet, this is us grabbing you by the collar. This one is pop metal and hyperpop metal, bright and melodic, and after everything we've screamed at you over the years, yeah, we wanted to make something that just feels good this summer.
But the sound is a trick! Underneath all that brightness, this is a song about escapism, about the desire to flee a world you can't actually escape. You're trapped in this shitty capitalist society no matter what you do, and the song lives in that trap. You dream of dropping out of it, quitting your shitty job, running off to live in a hippie commune or losing yourself in an endless party. But those are just clichés, and none of them actually solve the problems you're running from.
You leave them behind for everyone else to keep living, capitalism keeps grinding on without you, and you become another cliché in the process. There's nowhere to run where the same society isn't already waiting for you. You're still doing exactly what everyone stuck in their own shitty job dreams of doing, and dreaming it doesn't make you free, it just makes you one more person capitalism already knows how to sell the fantasy back to. We made it sound uplifting on purpose, because that's how escapism feels while you're inside it, right up until you see it changes nothing.
Bad Taste music player drops Thursday
This Thursday we're releasing our own music player, and it's the kind of thing the platforms would never build for us, so we built it ourselves. It's called Bad Taste, and it looks like it was ripped straight out of 2001. It's free, it runs in your browser, and our whole released discography is built right into it. No streaming! No account! No ads! Open it, hit play, and leave it running in a tab like you used to.
All our Pink Paradox albums and every single are in there, sorted into folders you can browse, with shuffle and repeat options available when you want to use them. It comes with multiple custom retro skins you can switch between at any time, each one its own look with its own fonts, icons, colors, frames, and layout. So picking a skin changes the whole feel of the player! And it's got multiple visualizers, with spectrum bars, an oscilloscope, a radial pulse, and two psychedelic tunnels that fly and spin to whatever's playing, all reacting to the actual audio.
Bad Taste runs with no download, on desktop or phone, and once it's loaded it's instant. Something the platforms would never build for us, so we built it ourselves. Stay tuned as we’ll share how to access it on Thursday!
Social media censor anyone who doesn't fall in line
Here's the part they don't want in the same post as the good news. It started with a Short! One about No Cuentes Conmigo, and in it you could see Rosa's arm and the old scarification marks she carries there. YouTube took the whole video down without any possibility to appeal. Then they sent us an email saying they were concerned about our mental health, and in the same breath started shadowbanning everything we've posted since, quietly throttling our Shorts on @pinkparadox-official so the numbers die on their own and nobody has to admit a thing. That's the trick with a shadowban! There's no notice to appeal, you just get slowly removed into nothingness.
Read that back. They erased the representation of real pain, then told us they were worried about us, to just burry our voice for weeks. That isn't concern! That's a muzzle with a fucking get-well card taped to it. And it's not just us! YouTube and Instagram do this to metal bands everywhere the second we talk honestly about mental health, scars, or real pain, because a person who feels something is a threat to the capitalist world they want to represent as sane. They only want efficient sheeps! They want content that turns you into a better worker or a happier little self-entrepreneur. Feeling bad, out loud, in public, is a menace to that whole capitalist order, so they make sure you never see the people who struggle, that you never can really express any pain, even more if you point them as the cause.
Instagram is running the same play. They just restricted several of our accounts at once today! We appealed Clara's, we did everything they asked, and it still hasn't come back. Clara is the quiet one, the geek who turns a violin loop she improvised half asleep into the spine of a whole record, and hers is the account they decided to keep gone. So we'll say it flat, the way we always do: you're becoming a worse place to be an artist by the month, and pretending it’s to make Instagram a safe place for everyone just makes it an unsafe place for creators, artists, and anyone else sharing content on your platform. This is exactly why we’re building our own music player Bad Taste, why we’re going to publish more on our website! You shouldn't need their permission to have a voice online or to hear a band you already love, and you shouldn't have to hide your scars to be allowed on their platform. On Thursday, you won't need them at all to headbang with us!
So here's the ask, and it's the same ask it always is. Play No Cuentes Conmigo loud! Come back Thursday for Bad Taste music player and keep it open where nobody can throttle it. And find us everywhere they can't bury us: every Pink Paradox account and every one of the band members social media pages are linked at pinkparadox.band/links, so go follow the band and each member across every platform we're on. The ones outside of YouTube and Instagram reach are the best ones to follow us on, and the more places you follow us, the less power any single one of them has to switch us off. They can delete a video, they can ban a profile, they can sit on Clara's appeal, but they can't delete the connection we’re building together.
Stay loud with us, en cualquier idioma!
