AJ Davila, the lead singer of the acclaimed Puerto Rican garage rock band Davila 666, released his debut solo album Terror Amor on February 18th via Nacional Records, followed by a successful appearance at last month’s SXSW in Austin, TX.
Davila’s debut solo album Terror Amor features collaborations with many of the biggest names in indie rock from across the Americas, including Cole Alexander (Black Lips), Alex Anwandter, Sergio Rotman (Los Fabulosos Cadillacs), Juan Cirerol and Fofe Abreu (Circo).
On ‘Terror Amor’, A.J. Davila brings together the guitar-fuzz of ‘60s garage, the raw energy of 70’s punk and the irrepressibly catchy choruses of 80s pop.
Although Terror Amor may not seem like a big departure to Davila 666 fans as there is still that feeling of garage, grunge and punk but with an even harder edge.
Terror Amor has been highly praised by the music critics, NPR wrote, “AJ Davila has an insanely strong new solo album called Terror Amor. Fans should be pleased to find that the album stays close to Davila’s garage-rock/doo-wop/punk roots, but dares to play with fun new elements”
Brooklyn Vegan first broke news of the new AJ Davila album, writing “While the record doesn’t stray too far from Davila 666’s sound, A.J. expands his sonic palette to include forays into glam.”
We met up with AJ Davila at the offices of Nacional Records where we had an animated conversation about the new album.
“I wanted to experiment with sounds and ideas that I couldn’t do with Davila 666, so I invited some friends and we began working on the album and we were very happy with the outcome so we contacted Nacional Records and they took us on.” Said AJ when asked about how this new album came about.
When asked about how different this new project is from his previous work AJ stated: “I consider myself a music lover and don’t like to box myself in and I love to experiment, on this album we experimented with the voices, we added a lot of keyboards and synthesizers, but always maintaining that essence of punk, rock & roll and the raunchy attitude.”
The title of the album “Terror Amor” (Terrifying Love) sounds somewhat contradicting or ambivalent to which AJ indicated: “It is an album of heartbreak, one has to be careful with love, because as wonderful as it can be, one can also suffer a lot with love.”
During our conversation, the subject of hip-hop came up several times and I mentioned that listening to their music, it would be almost unimaginable that there was a hip-hop influence since the album is full of guitars and a lot of rock & roll and punk and AJ replied: “We love hip-hop and in fact some of the drums tracks were pre-programmed by a tool that is used in hip-hop and lot of the production methods we use come from the hip-hop world, but we use it for rock & roll.”
If you like raunchy dirty fast rock & roll, you owe it to yourself to listen to Terror Amor and the album can be downloaded on iTunes, it can be streamed on Spotify and is also available on Amazon.
