In the American Psycho-inspired video for his single, “SUPEROFERTAS,” MARTTEIN runs around Buenos Aires like a man possessed. Dressed in the douchiest power suit conceivable, the theatrical dandy emerges from a posh townhouse and dips into a sports car with a personal driver, arriving at a busy investment firm where bloody chaos ensues. The clip highlights greed with pounding techno while its protagonist wails about living in the land of opportunity. That is, if you have the cold-blooded ambition to take what isn’t yours. As if summing up his new EP, ESPECTACULAR, out July 25, into a singular thesis statement, he screams, “Es el sueño sudamericano, champán y fugazzeta,” contrasting luxury libation against the cheap, proletariat favorite of cheese and onion pizza. MARTTEIN’s satire of gaudy aspirational wealth in a country infamous for economic instability is the latest in a series of fiercely political character studies that point the critical lens at social brainrot rather than corrupt politicians. After all, it’s no secret clowns are running the circus, but faces streaked in white keep popping up all around us.
“The record is about how the selfish impulses and philosophies of young people have been legitimized,” says the 24-year old MARTTEIN, speaking with Remezcla from the modest dining room of his Buenos Aires apartment. “I’m not talking about the government, rather about economic power, and how it moves and shapes social and political contexts. Ideologies shape those contexts, too, but it’s naive to think money has nothing to do with it. The EP suggests economic power is political power, and that capitalism has melted our brains.”
MARTTEIN is the larger than life alias of Martín Olveira, a singer, producer, and actor for whom music is the soundtrack to greater storytelling. Born for the stage, he began playing guitar at 11-years old, and shortly after, he started a punk band called The Slots alongside would-be trap-rock sensation Dillom. Encouraged by his parents, he enrolled in the Esnaloa performing arts high school, falling into a rigorous 12-hour routine that encompassed basic education as well as training in music and theater. Burned out, the teenager escaped into Buenos Aires’s evergreen rave scene, discovering a phantasmagoria of art and hedonism that kicked open a new world of expressive possibility.
The first years of MARTTEIN’s career were prolific but dense. A trilogy of LPs – ANTRO (2017), GUERRA (2018), and NÉMESIS (2019) – melded rock, industrial, and experimental music, and explored dystopian themes of family, society, gritty urban tales, and the end of innocence. “I knew I had a great artistic and sonic identity, but it was really difficult to communicate to the audience,” he remembers. MARTTEIN found his answers in pop, exploring hooky craftsmanship on the admittedly gothic 2021 EP, Romántica. Reception was again tepid, but intrigued by this new language, he started working on his next LP, a self-titled opus synthesizing the frustrations of overworked and misunderstood youths, which resonated with a stunted post-pandemic generation.
“The emotional premise of the album was that if it didn’t work, I was going to quit music,” says MARTTEIN, underlining the stakes of his creative process. “I was 23, earning a living from jobs that meant nothing to me, and pouring all my income and leftover time into this project. I was also tired of finding myself in the night. I started partying when I was 14, 15, so I was done with drugs and excess, but those were the places I needed to inhabit to bring my dreams to fruition. The record talks about all that, and the accompanying film amplified the scope of what this could all be.”
Set to hybrids of gabber, cumbia villera, and tango cadences, the appropriately titled MARTTEIN, UNA PELÍCULA ARGENTINA followed “El Rubio,” a grinning, convulsive punk that spoke in the colorful Porteño slang known as Lunfardo. “I wanted to challenge Argentina’s mainstream music industry,” he adds, “which for years has been about flexing money and speaking in a tone that is neither Porteño nor Argentine. I wanted to be the antithesis of all that, using Lunfardo and singing about Buenos Aires.”
“I wanted to challenge Argentina’s mainstream music industry, which for years has been about flexing money and speaking in a tone that is neither Porteño nor Argentine. I wanted to be the antithesis of all that, using Lunfardo and singing about Buenos Aires.”
For MARTTEIN, characters are a narrative extension rather than a facade to hide behind. Back in May, he introduced “El Marrón,” a Mick Jagger-strutting charlatan with cult leader ambitions that accompanied a rocking double-single of the same name. In June, during a packed Boiler Room set at the popular club Deseo, he worked the crowd into a frenzy while proclaiming himself “El Rey de la Noche,” even performing a campy Chippendale’s striptease. And now, in the film that accompanies ESPECTACULAR, embodying a spraytan-spackled LinkedIn bro is the perfect medium for skewering grotesque Libertarian avarice. From the title track’s facetious new age balladry, to revisiting pizza as a metaphor for Latin American precarity on the Six Sex-featuring thumper “Pizza Party,” the chamaeleonic banshee gleefully exposes rotted demagoguery.
“All of these characters are narcissists that represent elements from different social classes,” reflects MARTTEIN. “It makes no sense for ‘El Rubio’ to think he’s the ace of the scene when in reality he’s an idiot that lives with his mom. ‘El Marrón’ is about mystical delirium; a false prophet of sorts. And in ESPECTACULAR, the character is an arrogant shithead consumed by his money and possessions. Our idea is that when we present the project live, this October, to stage it as a trilogy.”
At a time when false prophets exert influence at unprecedented levels, MARTTEIN holding a mirror to the common man is a necessary dose of reality and self-criticism. Argentina’s long history of class solidarity is being tested by the rise of Libertarian egotism and incendiary political figures like President Javier Milei, with an entire country dreading a rehash of 2001’s devastating economic collapse. Political, economic, and generational uncertainty permeated recent acclaimed records like Dillom’s Por Cesárea, Saramalacara’s Heráldica, Fonso’s Día del Trabajador, and Juana Rozas’s Tanya. And even on a club banger like “ADELANTE,” MARTTEIN exults the only way out of hell is to power ahead, kicking and screaming.
“It’s not like the pandemic made me talk about serious things,” he adds with a sly smile. “I’ve always had my eye on the darkness.”
ESPECTACULAR is out now.
