Miguel Zavaleta, the singer, keyboard player and leader of Sueter, has died at 71. The news came out on Monday 31 August through a statement posted to the musician's Instagram account and signed by his daughter Lucrecia, who confirmed that her father had been treated for cancer for several months.
The illness explains, in retrospect, the cancellation of a Sueter show scheduled for the previous Saturday. That concert had been planned as a celebration of the band's 45 years and was called off at the time for reasons that were not made public.
Sueter formed in 1981 and found its own place in the Argentine scene quickly, with a sound close to new wave and lyrics that ran on humour and irony. The band sat alongside contemporaries such as Los Twist, Los Helicopteros and Viudas e Hijas de Roque Enroll, a group Zavaleta was connected to through the Comida China project. In 1982, Charly Garcia invited them to open his show at the Ferro stadium alongside Los Abuelos de la Nada.
The band's commercial peak came in 1985 with 20 caras bonitas, produced by Garcia. It carried Via Mexico, one of the most remembered Argentine songs of the decade, which Zavaleta wrote with Fabian Zorrito Von Quintiero and built around the ban on divorce then in force in Argentina.
Before that he had already written one of the durable anthems of Argentine rock. Amanece en la ruta, included on 1984's Lluvia de gallinas, was a fiction shaped by accounts from people who had come close to death, and Zavaleta dedicated it to a cousin killed in a car accident.
His last work with the band was La reserva moral de occidente in 2024, which revisited Sueter's catalogue with a new lineup and intergenerational guests, including Ruben Rada on Sin porteros. It also carried a new version of Extrano ser, written in 1984 and dedicated to Hilda Lizarazu, his partner at the time. Before Sueter, Zavaleta had played in Bubu, a band shaped by King Crimson, Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Genesis, which places his beginnings some distance from the pop songs that made his name in latin and Argentine rock.
The facts
- Miguel Zavaleta was 71 and had been treated for cancer for several months.
- The statement was posted to his Instagram account and signed by his daughter Lucrecia.
- Sueter formed in 1981 within Argentina's new wave scene.
- Charly Garcia invited the band to open his Ferro stadium show in 1982.
- Garcia produced their 1985 album 20 caras bonitas, which carried Via Mexico.
- Zavaleta wrote Amanece en la ruta, on 1984's Lluvia de gallinas.
- Sueter released La reserva moral de occidente, their last studio album, in 2024.
- A show marking the band's 45 years had been cancelled the previous Saturday.
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