Diles Que No Me Maten discuss new album Escrito en Agua

Mexico City band Diles Que No Me Maten has released Escrito en Agua, their fourth album and one of the most acclaimed records to come out of Mexico's indie scene in the last decade.

Frontman Jonás Derbez, who also plays saxophone and manages the band, traces the album's sound to childhood memories of staying up late watching his saxophonist father perform with a jazz ensemble. "Listening to his solos brings up so many childhood memories," Derbez said. The album opens with the instrumental "Las Noches Que Dormimos en Sillas" ("The Nights When We Slept on Chairs"), a tribute to those listening sessions that features his father on an alto sax solo.

The band takes its name from a short story by Mexican writer Juan Rulfo, author of Pedro Páramo, and its sound draws on an unusual mix of influences: the icy elegance of UK post-punk band Wire and the propulsive rhythms of German experimental group Can both surface across the record's freestyle poetry, melancholy jazz shades and post-rock textures. Guatemalan cellist Mabe Fratti, who performed on some of the band's earliest records, credited Derbez's poetry with a rare emotional directness, saying the group works "free of restrictions."

All five members of Diles Que No Me Maten are multi-instrumentalists, building songs around a core of guitars, bass and drums before layering in synthesizers, violin, flute, trumpet and clarinet. Derbez says the album deliberately holds together a lo-fi, rough-edged sensibility alongside more technically sophisticated arrangements. "We are different types of instrumentalists with varying degrees of talent and scholarship," he said. "But we like both components equally: the raw stuff and the layered bits."

The band's profile continues to grow beyond Mexico: their current European tour includes stops in Spain, France and the UK, with a US run to follow this fall, including an October 13 date at the Paramount in Los Angeles, part of a broader wave of attention on Latin indie and experimental rock, alongside recent releases from Alvaro Diaz and Leslie Grace tracked alongside Escrito en Agua in the release calendar, reaching new international audiences.