Chilean band Los Bunkers started out playing house parties and began doing covers of the Beatles and The Kinks, and took the B and the K and thus; the name Los Bunkers, came to be.
Los Bunkers have been around for over 10 years; 7 studio albums; several nominations to the MTVLA’s, several gold records; have played in the biggest music festivals in the continent; have opened for bands like Oasis, Nine Inch Nails, The Chemical Brothers and other major bands; have played Mexico City’s Zócalo in front of 120 thousand fans and now they have received a nomination for the Latin Grammy for “best rock album” for their current release “La Velocidad De La Luz”.
To learn more about Los Bunkers and their Latin Grammy nomination, we spoke via phone from Mexico City with drummer, Mauro Basualto.
INTERVIEW with Los Bunkers
Tell us how you feel about your Latin Grammy nomination for Best Rock Album.
“We are very happy to be nominated for such an important award, we feel it is a recognition for the album and all the work we put into it and it also helps the album and the band to be discovered by potential new fans”
On this new album, there seems to have been some influence by early 80’s dance music.
“We have a friend who would invite us to parties at his house and they used to play a lot of this early 80’s dance music and it opened up our minds to all these sounds we had kind of forgotten about like New Order, Pet Shop Boys, Duran Duran. All these music had brilliant production so we decided to incorporate some of those sounds into our music and we tried to come up with some type of mix, as it occurred on our first single “Bailando Solo”, which has that guitar sound that we are used to, but it also has some danceable rhythms, which at the end, it gave the album a freshness that we found very interesting.
How has the music of Los Bunkers evolved?
“We normally record in a very organic way, all five of us are always looking for new things, whether it is in music, literature, and movies and as time passes, we also change as people and those changes and experiences show up in our music. Ever since we were kids we were never happy doing the same things, so we are always looking for something new, and I think it also helps that there is a large age difference between the band members, I am 45 and the youngest just turned 30, so we also share all those different experiences”
