Combined with a throbbing guitar riff and aggressive drums, Esteban Azuela’s music video Drop Al Infierno for Los Viejos melts your face off. You barely catch your breath as you are hurled through a dystopian, 3D rendered Simpsons episode intermixed with the gray-haired musicians of Los Viejos, playing their instruments and skateboarding in a digitized landscape. As the thrashing momentum ceases to halt, Drop Al Infierno ultimately conveys a tale about flat earth conspiracy theories that litter the Internet with a tweaked-out sense of humor.

Drop Al Infierno starts with the familiar but skewed intro of The Simpsons. The blue sky, white clouds that are slightly muddy, and the bright, eye-catching yellow handwritten letters scribble “Los Viejos” instead of “The Simpsons” all at an accelerated frame rate. Viewers eventually settle on Lisa’s, but also not Lisa’s, face with bulging eyes rolled back and a gaping mouth with rotting and missing teeth. She reaches her hand down her throat and rips out a tooth squirting blood everywhere. This scene is appropriated from the Simpsons episode, Treehouse of Horror VIII, which features Lisa’s science experiment for the upcoming fair. In the original episode, Lisa combines her recently lost tooth with coca-cola in a petri dish to measure the damaging effects of caffeinated sugar drinks. Bart enters with his own experiment: rubbing a balloon on his head to create static electricity. As he pokes at Lisa, she then carries the electricity to her own petri dish experiment and accidentally sparks the start of a miniature civilization. There is an obvious parallel between the petri dish civilization and the lyrics about flat earth conspiracies, but while the original is lighthearted, Drop Al Infierno is an exhibition of visceral horror.

In Drop Al Infierno, the Simpson character's appearance is dramatically altered. Lisa has bulging eyes and missing teeth. Her skirt is short and her underwear are showing. Bart has a similarly updated aesthetic. He is bare chested exposing his collection of body art. Rather than fight with each other, as they do in the original episode, Bart and Lisa laugh and giggle. When Bart picks up one of the people living on the tiny flat earth and pops it in his mouth, Lisa looks at him, nudges him with her elbow, and offers a sinister chuckle. Lisa does not take a role as the protector of the tiny world in this version of the episode. The flat earthers are different as well. They move and dance awkwardly to the music and rhythm of Los Viejos. The band members skate around in this tiny world and play their instruments. As they jam, they infect those around them. The civilians mosh. Looking through a microscope, Lisa witnesses this mosh pit and her body begins to pulsate and thrash around the room. Her head changes as the music goes on into the gray-haired head of Los Viejos. Eventually, Bart and Lisa both have Los Viejos heads but maintain their childlike bodies. The world of Lisa and Bart mixes with the small civilization to the point of being indistinguishable. This new musical skating thrashing moshing frankenstein civilization conquers the world.

Drop Al Infierno sustains a reference to the Simpsons ethos of Americana Azuela, purposely intended to recreate the Simpsons living in Mexico City’s suburbs: El cerro del Chiquihuite. This is evidenced by elements that appear in the video related to Mexican culture such as the tortilla press flattening the earth, the Mexican beer Tecate being poured over Lisa’s tooth, and the lo-fi aesthetic of Google Maps for the digitized landscape that the band members skate around throughout the song.

A central message in the Simpsons episode Treehouse of Horror VIII is the questioning of science, belief, and political power through humor, which makes it an ideal candidate for Viejos to reference in Drop Al Infierno. Like many thrash bands, Los Viejos offers a criticism of the establishment, particularly of the United States, and the destruction of the environment. Through the shredding guitar riffs and double bass drumming, Los Viejos sing: “Maybe NASA made us believe with fake photos. A happy circle, lying. Walk to the end, a drop to hell.” These dystopian lyrics recognize a world that is a more-than-human community and a depiction of ecocide. At a time when science denial is at an all-time high, Drop Al Infierno offers a dark cathartic space to face our fears with some twisted macabre humor.

Livy Snyder Interview with Esteban Azuela

Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you came to create the video artwork for the song Drop Al Infierno by the thrash metal/skate/grind/punk duo Los Viejos.

Despite the senile age of Jacobo and Eustaquio, it is not an issue for us to have a great friendship. I’ve created 3 music videos with them, and we have collaborated on their live visuals for many years. Their energy on stage and the freedom of speech in the band is priceless.

It sounds like you are really in tune with the band and their creative direction whether it's at a concert in person or online as a music video. Can you talk about how the live visuals compare with the music videos that you make?

Doing live visuals with Los Viejos is a completely different experience. While editing the music videos at my studio, I can be very precise in terms of editing but the energy is not the same. Going on tour with them I plan as little as possible the way the show is going to happen. I grab about 100 different loops of animation made for the music videos that can be discarded renders or work in progress loops connected to a midi controller and I try to improvise with the rhythm of the show. I go as fast as I can with the strobe lighting and invert bottom so the audience can feel the led screen as a third instrument of the band.

I read on Discogs that Old Eustaquio has an ultra-fast double bass drum that will make mucus drain from your ears—is it true? What was your first impression of the song Drop Al Infierno?

Sarcasm, humor, wind on the face.

As a metalhead slowly becoming too old for the DIY music scene, I really appreciate the blast beat and wicked fast tempo of the song played by “old” people. I’m curious, what about this band inspires you the most?

Eustaquio goes nuts for being the fastest drummer on earth and myself being a meticulous thinker on the fragmentation of time, resulted in this path to go on for the visual rhythm. In parallel with his blast-beats, Yurex Omazkin and I created the music video of Amnesia en el Estado in 2016. We had many goals, but one of them was to create an obsessive piece with 60 very different frames each second with tons of information about Mexican violence. It was delicious to make this maximalist video montage but revisiting violent tragedies while editing, was an awkward mix. Four years later, with Drop Al Infierno, I wanted to start bringing humor to my work, at least in the music videos and get along with Los Viejos vision to enjoy the music, the stage, the slam and the joyful feeling of skateboarding. This pushed me to Los Simpsons.

I love how you reference an iconic American television show for Drop Al Infierno. Can you speak more about your use of popular icons such as the Simpsons?

I see references to the yellow family in my language while I speak. The Simpson’s episode, “The Genesis Tub, on Tree House of Horror VII” is a reference to the Microcosmic God in a science fiction novelella by Theodore Sturgeon and, like the universe that holds Men In Black´s cat in it’s collar, have been ideas that I always excite me; to be living inside a microcosmos for someone else in a distant scale of time. Then, with the powerful team at LINEA 2 ( www.linea2.mx ) we situated The Simpsons in Mexico City’s suburbs: El cerro del Chiquihuite.

What has been the best way for you to describe these frankenstein characters that are part Bart and Lisa and part Los Viejos? Are they wearing masks of Los Viejos? Or have their heads actually turned into them?

This was a creative freedom from 3d artist Daniel Cabrera. He's all into gore looking characters so he could have fun with this mix between Lisa, Bart and the senile Viejos.

You also depict a famous monument that is beheaded by Bart and Lisa with Los Viejos heads in the very beginning of the video. You mentioned it was Christopher Columbus in our email conversation. Is this addition a response to the movement to remove monuments?

I don't think that removing a statue is going to change our perception of history. I would rather leave those symbols present but modified. In this video we just modified Christopher Colombus removing his head. A hint to the decolonisation movement happening these days in Latin America.

Is there anything else you would like to say about the creation of this work? Can you discuss your aesthetic influences?

Yes, many musical genres are married to very particular aesthetic styles. As I do not carry any musical genre as a flag in my life, I gave myself the permission to give color where generally all the black & white. The Igorrr video made by MeatDept is proof of a great recent aesthetic mix of sound and rendered image.

What tools did you use in order to create the artwork? Do you think there is a certain quality about using 3d tools that appeals to metal aesthetics?

The techniques chosen were all about the economy of technical resources to tell a Microcosmic God parody with digital animation without going out of the studio in 2 months. To match the low-fi aesthetic of Google Maps, we joined with VOLUMETRICA.xyz (www.volumetrica.xyz) to do photogrammetry of the musicians. Experimental cinema has showed us the use of image re-employment and to steal material from other sources. With Daniel Belmont, Elizabeth Cacho and this tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_XsmoZJmG8 we could steal or re-use the images that Google Earth has created. But they have gone further on this, they are creating the tridimensional Earth that we will use every day in a near future and they didn’t ask permission to take pictures of my rooftop.

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