Band:	Santo Rostro
Album:	Despu​é​s No Habrá Nada
Style:	Doom metal, Stoner metal
Release date:	March 2023

01. Telarañas
02. Carcasa Digital
03. Aire
04. Matriz
05. Después No Habrá Nada

Likely due to common ground in terms of association with mind-altering substances, stoner rock/metal and psychedelic rock are frequently found mentioned in close proximity to one another. Although there’s certainly numerous bands to which the two tags could be both applied, they’re not necessarily interchangeable; on Después No Habrá Nada, Santo Rostro show both how the styles can overlap, and how they can diverge.

Spain’s Santo Rostro, who have previously received some love on our site from BitterCOld, once fell fairly comfortably into one category; as BC said when reviewing previous album The Healer, Santo Rostro were playing to their strengths when “creating tracks that revolve around crunchy, dirty stoner riffs”. Those were their strengths then, but perhaps time has led to them training other strengths, as Después No Habrá Nada cannot simply be lumped into the stoner rock scene. They certainly haven’t dissolved the ties to their past; “Telarañas” opens with a suitably fuzzy, rocking riff, but even on this song (the shortest on the record, with Santo Rostro taking the Wintersun approach of sequentially going from shortest to longest song), there’s touches of psychedelia in some of the guitar layering and synths. As the album progresses, however, those drops form into flowing rivers of madness.

An area in which Santo Rostro have clearly grown is their rhythmic ambition; the frenetic, jazzy drumming and off-kilter rhythms in “Carcasa Digital” are almost exhausting in their dizzying energy, particularly with the gruff shouted vocal style matching that level of energy. Add in rhythmically complex, stabbing guitar riffs and swirling synths, and it’s a lot to take in; “Aire” starts deceptively simply, but it too has its frantic and cacophonic moments. This isn’t Oranssi Pazuzu territory, but the mixture of heaviness (particularly vocally) with such trippy, layered, unpredictable instrumentation does leave one wondering why ‘psychedelic metal’ hasn’t become as ubiquitous as a parallel to psychedelic rock as stoner metal has to stoner rock.

A quirk of that tracklist arrangement is that the closing 2 songs take up 20 of the album’s 34 minutes; with such a relatively large portion of the runtime, there is space in these two songs to recontextualize that psych-rock exuberance with the stoner fuzz and heaviness that dominated past efforts from Santo Rostro. The most obvious example of the extent to which the band have mixed things up this time around is “Matrix”; for the first two-thirds of this 8-minute beast, Santo Rostro carry on pretty much where they left off on the previous two songs, with lively, chaotic drumming, dizzying overlapping guitar and synth elements, and a cute solo. It’s as they approach the final third that hints come of what is to come, before they change tack entirely and throw themselves right into huge, fuzzy stoner doom riffing for a slow yet emphatic climax. The title track embraces both sides of the coin, alternative between psych-rock jamming and stoner doom trudging, bringing the best of both in a 12-minute journey that finishes in surprisingly evocative manner with the final soloing.

With Después No Habrá Nada, Santo Rostro demonstrate that they’re not ashamed of where they came from, but they’re also not afraid to explore musically. The end result is very entertaining, and offers good signs for future explorations.