Hailing from Monterrey, Nuevo León, A Mors et Bello is a band that has spent years walking through some of the darkest paths of Mexican Black Metal. The band began its journey in 1999 and, throughout the years, has been part of different stages and movements within the underground scene. With a sound rooted in Black Metal and themes connected to Satanism, the band has left its mark through various releases and compilations. Now, we want to look both at their most recent work and at those early steps that helped shape their history. We talked with Andras Mors, founding member, about their origins, their musical evolution, their influences, and what it means to remain active in the underground after so many years.
To start things off, tell us a little about A Mors et Bello. How did the project come together, and what led you to choose Black Metal as your means of expression? A Mors et Bello came out of another project my brother had called Divine Blood. It was something very short-lived; a few songs came out of it, but they were never recorded. They played a rawer kind of Black Metal.
Later, when I came back from the United States, that’s when we really started playing, writing and recording music under the name A Mors et Bello.
At first, we wanted to have a band that was more Death Metal-oriented, but in the end we were much more influenced by the demos of bands like Beherit, Emperor and early Satyricon. That’s how we started trying to create a sound that represented us, and over the years we kept developing it until we created the sound that represents us today.
Monterrey has a particular history within Mexican Metal. What was the scene like when you started, and what difficulties did you run into during those early years? What a good question! Well, we started getting into the Monterrey scene in the late ’90s. When we arrived, many bands had already stopped playing or no longer existed, while others had taken a break. So by the late ’90s and early 2000s, it was already a completely different scene from what it had been in the ’90s.
The bands that started around that time had a more progressive vision. We were trying to sound more professional, with a more evolved sound, more complex riffs and more brutal drumming.
One of the first things we noticed that was going to make things difficult for us as a new band was how little interest many bands and fans still had in music that was more developed, like what bands from other countries were already doing, where Raw Black Metal was no longer the only thing happening.
I think that was the first difficulty we had to deal with: people who were used to listening to bands with simpler music, and who called us posers, hahaha. The funny thing is that nowadays, all those people who called us posers ended up being the posers themselves.
The second problem was the lack of places to play back then. It was mostly shitty bars and tiny venues where everything was always wrong: the sound, the space, everything crammed together.
Then the jealousy started coming from members of bands that had already been playing for years, from bands that had started in the ’90s. They were guys much older than my brother and me and the members who played with us. We were just kids, 17, 15 and 14 years old.
We definitely noticed that our approach bothered them, hahaha. But well, that’s still how it is nowadays with musicians who have played the same way their entire lives and never improved.
In the end, they just told us to go fuck ourselves, hahaha. Sorry for the bad language.
Let’s talk about your early releases… How would you describe the sound and essence of the band back then? Is there any old recording that you consider especially important to your history? The sound we had was more raw, with dark atmospheres and keyboards leaning towards old Emperor and Enslaved, since we were big fans of both bands. We were very young and heavily influenced by them, especially Emperor.
I remember my brother and I going out into the streets wearing corpse paint, and we used to spit at Christian people who got scared when they saw us walking around the neighbourhood where we lived. You know, nothing but upper-class, Catholic people. We were the only two punks in the neighbourhood listening to Black Metal, and we were heavily influenced by the music.
We wanted to carry it with us all the time, you know how it is when you’re a teenager and you first get into the world of Black Metal.
We have one recording that is really important to me. It’s just a few songs we recorded during a rehearsal in our bedroom, where we lived with our parents.
I consider it important because we never recorded those songs properly, and even though the sound isn’t very professional, I feel that’s where we started from and how we eventually got to where we are today.
Maybe if we hadn’t recorded that rehearsal, we never would have pushed ourselves as hard to try to play at the level we’re at today.
From the 2001 demo ‘Dominazione di Satanas’ to your later releases, how would you describe the evolution of A Mors et Bello? Do you feel the essence of the band has changed, or has it simply found different ways to express itself? Well, basically, the evolution is very obvious. From the first demo we recorded, then the rehearsal I mentioned in the previous question, to the next album we recorded as a full-length, and later the other two releases we’ve made, it would be ridiculous to say there hasn’t been any evolution.
There are people who have said that, but you know how those people are. It’s nothing but jealousy because they never managed to achieve what we did.
For me, that’s very important because it defines us as a band and proves that we’re not a band that closes itself off or buries itself in a hole doing the same thing forever.
Some people might say, “There are more brutal bands,” but the thing is, the evolution here was done only by my brother and me. It wasn’t like other bands where five or six members create this brutal sound they have, but wouldn’t necessarily be able to achieve it on their own.
And as far as the essence of the band goes, yes, of course it has changed. We’re not the same kids we were back then. The subjects we deal with are more realistic, more disturbing, more terrifying, more grotesque.
Because of that, we’ve had shows censored or cancelled in different places, people talking shit about us, and all that controversy. We even became a very criticised band in countries like Bulgaria because of a member of some page I’ve never even heard of.
But I’m actually thankful for it, because whether the publicity is good or bad, it works very well as promotion.
Controversy is what makes people take the blindfolds off, remove the plugs from their ears and pay more attention to you.
At the end of the day, I don’t care if people criticise us, call us misogynists, Satanists, or whatever else they’ve added to my name, my brother’s name and the band.
We’re not trying to please anybody. Quite the opposite. If you could see how happy I am not to be liked by a lot of people, because otherwise many of them would feel comfortable approaching me, talking to me or getting too familiar.
I wouldn’t have the solitude and peace I have in my life today, away from everything and everyone.
In 2005, ‘Sounds of Horror’ appeared, a release belonging to an important period in your career. What can you tell us about the songwriting, recording process and atmosphere surrounding the creation of that album? Yeah, well, for us that album is probably one of the most important ones because my brother and I had the opportunity to record the entire album ourselves. The songwriting and lyrics were also completely done by the two of us.
That was when the evolution we were going through really started becoming obvious, especially because of the equipment we were using to record at the time.
Back then, here in my city, it wasn’t very common to record drums with triggers. A lot of musicians didn’t know about them, and others knew what they were but had never used them. Even today, many still don’t use them.
There were other things in that studio that helped us achieve a sound that was very different from what we had done before.
I think that album was the turning point. That’s when I started writing more progressive music, because I’m the kind of person who is never satisfied with what I do. I always want more. I always want to grow and evolve.
Of course, without abandoning my old influences or losing the essence I started with. I just like adding something new from here, something else from there, a little bit of this and that, while always keeping that old-school sound I started with in mind.
And the atmosphere when we recorded that album was, I’d say, one of the strangest and creepiest.
The studio was inside a very, very old house in downtown Monterrey, and several things happened while we were recording that really freaked us out. Not just us, but even the owner of the studio.
At one point, I actually had to leave the drum booth to listen to something that had been recorded. The studio owner told me he hadn’t recorded anything.
There were some really weird sounds mixed into one of the songs we were working on, and it freaked us out.
I’ve never really been much of a believer in spirits or ghosts and that kind of stuff, but the studio owner definitely seemed freaked out by the fact that we were hearing things that shouldn’t have been there.
The bad part was that we had to record that entire section of the song again so those sounds wouldn’t be there anymore.
When we finished recording it, they were gone.
I don’t know… maybe they were signs from the other side, hahaha.
Anyway, the whole thing was pretty crazy, but in the end we managed to create a sound that, at that time, had never really been heard in Monterrey.
Nowadays, if you listen to a lot of new bands, it almost seems like they copied each other. They all sound the same and have the same concept.
‘Stories About Feminicides and Other Minors Deaths’ has a very direct and dark title. What ideas, experiences or aspects of reality shaped that release? What place do the lyrics occupy within the band’s identity? The ideas came from my brother and he handled the whole lyrical concept. I just focused on the music.
For this album, I completely changed tunings and started writing more on a seven-string guitar in standard tuning. We also used an eight-string guitar, some octave arrangements and other techniques I had never used on guitar before, as well as different things on the drums.
Musically, I ended up really enjoying it because I spent many months practising and studying all these techniques that I hadn’t used before.
As for the ideas and experiences behind it, it was mostly something that came out of nowhere, or rather, from everything that was happening in our city.
For years now, there have been feminicides happening all the time. We even witnessed the aftermath of a case where a woman was murdered by her husband, who cut off her head out of jealousy.
There was also a friend of an acquaintance who became a complete monster and strangled his wife, and so many other murders that keep happening and will probably continue to happen.
The album isn’t only about feminicides. It also deals with infanticide, school shootings and other murders. Every lyric is based on a real event.
What we basically wanted to do was tell a horror story.
I’m not saying we’re the only band that has done this. There are plenty of bands that tell stories on their albums about knights killing dragons, or about people who killed children or other people.
We decided to do the same thing, but based on stories from our own country and, more specifically, our own city.
More than anything, we wanted to change what we had usually done before.
If you look around, and I’m not saying this to criticise anybody in a bad way, there are way too many bands talking about the same things.
And yeah, we’re not doing anything new or original, but I think that at least in our city, nobody had done it before.
I think that also pissed a lot of people off, because there was always that double-standard Black Metal guy who considers himself the son of Satan and true Black Metal at night, but during the day you see him acting like a complete clown inside a church, at baptisms, getting married himself, or accompanying his aunts, uncles or cousins to some religious celebration.
To me, that’s just absurd and contradictory behaviour from those kinds of guys. But whatever, that’s how those people are.
They criticise us when they see someone doing something different, or doing something they themselves never managed to do.
And as for your question about the place of the lyrics within the band’s identity, I’ll be completely honest with you: none.
Just because someone writes, sings or acts in a play doesn’t mean that person actually is what they’re portraying or talking about.
We’re neither for nor against feminicides or murders. We stand completely apart from all of that and from everyone else.
We live in our own microcosm. We simply like watching the world burn and making fun of hypocrisy, double standards and, why not, people’s lack of balls when it comes to accepting what they really are.
In many cases, they’re just fucking nasty, treacherous hypocrites, and very often the person smiling the most is the one who’ll stab you in the back the hardest.
So basically, we just wanted to create an album about everything that was happening at the time and see how even other Metalheads would get freaked out by what we were doing.
As they say: murderers of murderers.
At a time when many bands are aiming for increasingly polished productions, how important is it for you to preserve your own identity? It’s very important for us to keep the identity we’ve created over the years, because that’s what has separated us from other bands here in Monterrey, and even from bands in other parts of Mexico.
The moment you hear one of our songs, even without knowing it’s us, you can tell it was made by A Mors et Bello because of the peculiar sound we have.
That’s what makes people recognise us.
Without that identity and that characteristic sound, I think we’d be nothing. We’d just be another band in the crowd, sounding like a lot of other bands.
The underground has changed a lot since the late ’90s… physical formats, distribution, social media and the way people discover music are completely different now. How have you experienced these changes from within the band? What do you think has been gained and what has been lost in the scene? As you said, the underground world has changed a lot.
I think that nowadays, bands that call themselves underground sometimes use it as an excuse, because they’re bands that simply don’t interest a lot of people.
With so many social networks and all the possibilities available today, it’s difficult for a band to be underground by choice. In reality, most of those bands are underground because the audience decides they are.
But yeah, everything has definitely changed.
New generations aren’t really looking for physical formats anymore. Most of the people who still look for them are people who actually lived through the ’90s and early 2000s and are still in love with that format.
Others just collect albums that, in many cases, they haven’t even listened to and don’t even know what the bands sound like.
What we’ve gained is that it’s easier to get yourself heard. If you invest a little money into your band, it can reach a lot more people, especially if you have an interesting proposal.
But a lot has also been lost in the scene: the essence of the bands. I think that’s what has been lost the most.
New bands have more opportunities, but many of them don’t have the same essence as the ’90s bands that started out and evolved over time.
I think a lot of bands try to imitate or recreate that sound, but sometimes they’re just soda bottles with no soda inside.
Even many bands that actually lived through that era never managed to develop that essence either, and ended up stuck doing the same thing over and over.
I think that’s what has been lost the most in the scene: the essence.
What can we expect from A Mors et Bello in the future? Is there new material in the works, reissues, shows or any projects you’d like to share with those who have followed the band’s journey? Well, right now we’re basically preparing a cassette with a different cover, different artwork and a special edition with only a small number of copies of our latest full-length, ‘Stories About Feminicides’.
That’s being worked on for the end of this year or early next year. There will also be a T-shirt.
I already have enough material to put together another full-length as well. Maybe next year I’ll start working on the production and decide which songs I like the most to keep and record.
We have an invitation to play at a festival, but nothing has been confirmed yet. Usually promoters or organisers don’t want to pay travel expenses. They just want you to show up.
That’s something I take into consideration from the beginning. We don’t make a living from this, but we’re not going to pay out of our own pockets just to play either.
As far as playing live goes, I’m not really planning on doing it. In fact, it’s been a while since I’ve been interested in playing live. I’d rather record more albums.
I have many personal reasons why I’m no longer interested in playing live.
Honestly, the whole “sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll” lifestyle doesn’t really represent me, and neither does partying.
I’d rather focus on making music and putting it out there.
It’s not because there’s no interest from promoters, organisers or even fans who want to see us play. Of course there are plenty of people who would love to see us play live again.
But honestly, like I said and I’ll repeat it, my ideology and my mindset have changed a lot.
I’m no longer interested in playing live all the time, every weekend, every Saturday, partying with people I don’t know, getting drunk with people I don’t know.
I’ve become a little more selective.
And that’s pretty much all I can share about the future for now.
Thank you very much for your time and for sharing part of the band’s history with us. Finally, what message would you like to send to those who continue supporting the Mexican underground, and to those discovering A Mors et Bello for the first time? No, thank you! Seriously, thank you very much for your time and for giving us this space.
The support is amazing. It’s great that there are still people interested in our music.
And what I would tell people is: stop drinking milk from the same cow.
There are so many bands out there that aren’t very well known but have an incredibly professional level and some really fucking good music.
Don’t let yourselves be dazzled by social circles, cliques and bands that are constantly trying to convince everyone that they’re the best.
There’s always someone better. There will always be better bands. There will always be bands that fit your musical tastes more.
Don’t become sheep. Don’t close yourselves off to new bands and new proposals.
Take the time to check out our band if you don’t know us.
And don’t let yourselves be influenced by rumours, criticism or gossip from other people, because I’m telling you for real: there are many bands that, if you actually give them a listen, could change your life.
Maybe it won’t be my band, but it could be another band. Who knows?
It’s just a matter of taking the time to be more open-minded about it.
And finally, I want to thank everyone again for the support, and thank you for the interview.
Sending you a big hug, and hopefully this won’t be the only or the last time we get to be featured on this blog.
Underground forever!
