*300 copies limited edition* Mexico City trio Mengers have been threatening to detonate for years. Across their first two albums—Golly’s simulated-chaos ruminations and i/O’s desolate drift—they turned existential dread into a combustible punk language: jagged guitars, convulsing rhythms, lyrics like condensed panic attacks. With Flavio, their third studio album and most adventurous yet, they finally make good on that threat. It’s a record that doesn’t just expand their sound—it completely reimagines the boundaries of contemporary Mexican rock.

The band—brothers Carlos and Pablo Calderón alongside bassist Mauricio Suárez— enlisted again with Hugo Quezada in his Progreso Nacional and wrote Flavio by abandoning guitars-first punk structures and instead building songs from dance grooves, electronics, and swapped instruments. The result is a wiry, mutated strain of dance-punk that owes as much to krautrock hypnosis and techno propulsion as it does to Suicide’s minimalism or Liquid Liquid’s excentric percussion. The effect is dizzying: a record that fuses austerity and excess, collapse and euphoria, often within the same breath.

Flavio arrives at a moment when much of global rock feels timid, nostalgic, or overly polished. Mengers push in the opposite direction, carving out a noisy, danceable, and defiantly weird lane that few bands anywhere—Mexican or otherwise—are occupying. Like Can, Pussy Galore, or Primal Scream before them, they refuse to sit still, and their restless experimentation pays off here. 

With Flavio, Mengers haven’t just leveled up—they’ve made one of the most vital, forward-thinking rock records of the year, and one that confirms their place as a band rewriting the DNA of underground music in Mexico and beyond.