Madame Germen was a legendary band from the city of A Coruña in the autonomous community of Galicia, Spain. During their brief existence from 2002 to 2005, they released three albums, all sung in their native Galician language and imbued with lyrics charged with harsh social and political criticism.
Madame Germen’s lyrical themes tackled a range of pressing issues including mass surveillance and social control, the collapse of societies under capitalist techno-industrial domination, resource wars, exploitation of non-human animals and nature, peak oil, and the severe impacts of human activity on the planet. Their intense yet emotional sound later earned the labels emocrust or neocrust.
In April 2024, Madame Germen’s own Paul David Silva Pérez created an Instagram account for the band aimed at resurrecting their legacy through photos, videos, and other memories that fans have collected over the years. Although the band played hundreds of shows, it remains shrouded in enigma with scant information available on the English-speaking side of the web. For this reason, and because Madame Germen has been among my favorite bands, I connected with Paul for this interview to uncover the story of one of the best neocrust bands to ever exist.
Paul, please tell us how Madame Germen started, what was the idea behind the band and did you have a specific musical direction? With bands like Ekkaia taking their name from J. R. R. Tolkien, is Madame Germen also a reference in literature or movies?
The reason for our name came in part from the tense geopolitical situation that the world was experiencing until the invasion of Iraq by the United States. In this way, Dr. Rihab Rashid Taha gave the name to Madame Germen.
Called “Dr. Germ” by the United States, she was accused of developing biological weapons of mass destruction for Iraq. A lie was constructed about her, a scapegoat identified, and another false story manufactured so that the United States could invade Iraq. She is an Iraqi microbiologist accused of leading a program to develop anthrax and botulism bacteria that Iraq allegedly prepared for use against Israel and the US-led coalition. No one found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Another lie to cover up a geopolitical war to steal energy resources. All went unpunished.
At that time we were very influenced by French bands like Anomie or An-Attâ (Anomie members playing hardcore with violin), so we decided to change from “Doctor Germen” to “Madame Germen”, it sounds more Frenchy, haha!!!
Could you describe the DIY punk and hardcore scene in A Coruña in the early 2000s? With the presence of bands like Ekkaia, Beltain/Nashgul, Hongo, SL’S3, and later Ictus, Cop On Fire, Blünt, did it feel like a close-knit circle of musicians or did you see yourselves as part of a larger movement that has since diminished?
There have always been a lot of bands in A Coruña, but maybe at that time there was a lack of places to play. The Montealto and El Zuecos rehearsal spaces were the hot spots where all the bands you mentioned came together. I think the lack of spaces was the driving force to look for places where we could play without paying rent or technicians or anything. I think that’s where this whole union started. I see it from that perspective but I am not from A Coruña, nor did I live there.
But I think the starting point was after the eviction of Okupa da Ría, which, together with the rising prices of renting concert halls and the ethics of do-it-yourself culture, were the driving forces to unite and occupy spaces to play. Las Ruinas, Atochas, Palavea, La Cúpula del Trueno, La Nave, these were occupied spaces where what we can call the “scene” was built.
Your tracks have explored intense themes of fear, oppression and resistance, and you have chosen to express these in Galician. Do you feel it’s crucial for bands to use their native tongue to articulate complex issues instead of simplifying their messages in English, much like Discharge wrote haikus about the horrors of war?
Galician is the native language of Galicia. It is our mother tongue, it is the language in which I personally grew up and was educated, it is the language that I speak in my daily life, it is the language in which I think, reflect and write to express myself. To write our songs, Madame Germen has used Reintegrationist Galician, which is not the normative Galician, but rather the one that follows the linguistic, cultural and social current of the Lusophone languages (Portuguese).
From 2002 to 2005 Madame Germen released three influential LPs. Could you walk us through the themes and the evolution of the band’s sound? Would you say that your lyrics were influenced more by primitivist ideas (e.g. John Zerzan’s interlude in Invocacion A Morte) and the collapse of civilization than by social anarchism (libertarian communism)?
Absolutely. Madame Germen is first of all an anti-fascist band. It is good to read and feed on different currents of libertarian thought, and in that sense I think we have been leaning towards that strain of thought of Green Anarchism, more anti-technological, anti-speciesism, animal liberation, self-management and more ecological consciousness given the constant degradation and destruction of our planet. Earth First! has greatly influenced the content of our lyrics along with writings from Thoreau, Tolstoy and Rousseau to Shepard, Zerzan, Kaczynski to name a few.
During Madame Germen’s active years, how many shows did you perform, and of these, how many took place in squats and autonomous spaces? Given the transient nature of such venues, many of which were brutally evicted and may no longer exist, how has performing in these spaces influenced your music? Could you share any memorable stories from your international tours? Were there any countries you hoped to visit but were unable to?
I remember with great affection one of our first gigs, it was in 2002 at Okupa da Ría with Ekkaia, 25 Comin’ Fire and Consumatum Est. It would be the last concert before the eviction, collapse and subsequent construction of a seafront promenade. I think it was the beginning of many important things and helped us to choose the path the band took.
Today I try to recover a little bit of memory, not only mine, but also that of Madame Germen, by collecting all kinds of material that could help us to reconstruct our activity and our short life. In the beginning we didn’t stop playing—small local concerts, festivals, small tours in the peninsula and we even did two European tours, playing non-stop for more than two months in a row on each of them. We decided to move to the B-Hof in Chemnitz, Germany. We played there whenever we could. Our last concert was in Stuttgart at the Be-part of the Scene festival in 2005 organized by Alerta Antifascista (I’m looking for the poster). In between… I can’t tell you an exact number, but it could be more than 200 concerts in those four intense years…
I think we all would have liked to play in Norway, one of the few European countries we couldn’t play in, and also to go to America, especially Mexico and for sure Brazil and the west coast states of the US and Canada. I think it would have been special to have played in Japan… Everywhere is a must.
Tragedy and Remains of the Day both released their debut albums around 2000, contributing to the styles now known as neocrust, emocrust, or epic crust. How do you relate to these tags? Do you consider Madame Germen, along with Ekkaia and Ictus, to be among pioneers of a new subgenre? Additionally, what were your other influences at that time, and how do you compare your sound to those North American bands in terms of similarities and differences?
I have always identified more with hardcore punk. Personally, I don’t care if people try to add or omit tags to identify the sound of a band, it will always depend on each person’s musical culture or need to define or frame the style that each band evokes in them. Tagging is natural in music.
Ekkaia is by far our biggest influence, by proximity, by coincidence of time and place, by concern and ideology, and by friendship. They were a really great band, a live steamroller. Although it is true that in our beginnings and even before our first recording, we could sound more like bands such as Anomie or An-Attâ mixed with old-school hardcore, including the violin in our sound. In that sense, when we had the violin early on (we didn’t know Remains of the Day at that time), we tried to create parts with mid-tempos to give the violin prominence, all without losing the hardcore punk essence. Probably this gave the band a distinct character, also singing in Galician language.
Probably at that time we had other main influences, ranging from the aforementioned Anomie/An-Attâ, through Neurosis, Envy, Botch (we played the “Carmina Burana” version) to Stretch Arm Strong (César and I were obsessed with Rituals of Life, their album from 2000). Later I remember that it was Pablo (Ekkaia) who gave us the first albums of Tragedy and Remains of the Day and a mixtape with His Hero is Gone, which tells you everything. Our last phase, before we recorded Invocacion A Morte, we couldn’t stop listening to His Hero is Gone, Breach and even At the Gates, maybe it was our darkest period. At least for me, I guess His Hero Is Gone was the real turning point in the sound that later influenced what is known today as neocrust or emocrust, even before Tragedy.
Do you think that with the easy accessibility of the internet, even the most passionate and political forms of hardcore punk music have become just a homogeneous form of entertainment rather than inspiring insurrection? How do you feel about your music being distributed through modern (capitalist) music streaming platforms?
We just wanted to play and travel and meet people and other bands. We weren’t really aware of anything else. That the people who “discover” you can listen to your music thanks to the Internet seems positive to me. In the bands I played in or play in now, on these digital music platforms, listening is free and unlimited, and downloads are free, but whoever can or wants to contribute financially, they have the choice.
But it’s a fuck because of this digital “sale”, the platforms take a part of the money, for this reason, we wish there was the possibility of free download. I believe in and defend the physical format more, despite the fact that the prices are less and less reasonable, both for production and distribution, and of course the physical format is inaccessible for most people. But you also have to think about what it can cost a band to record an album and what it costs to maintain and play in a band. Sometimes it seems like all this has to be ignored.
On the other hand, I believe that DIY should not be confused with non-profit or even free, especially when it comes to third parties who benefit even minimally from this issue. Currently, Madame Germen’s music is not on any digital music platform officially or with our consent. We know that something is out there, but no one has asked us, nor do they have our consent, and we include in this the labels that once released our music in physical format. There seems to be a pending question about digital music. I think the most sensible thing would be for us to set up our own site on some digital platform to release our music with the aim that it can be downloaded and listened to for free. We are going to do something about it as we speak and at this point we are not worried.
You were one of the bands that incorporated elements of black metal in the early 2000s, when the genre wasn’t as popular among punks as it is now. Since black metal bands often have sketchy politics, how do you feel about listening to or being musically influenced by artists who are known to be racist, right-wing, and abusive?
I’m not an expert on black metal, but I think that this style of music has not influenced us. The only thing that attracts me to black metal is its avowed anti-Christianity and its contempt for religion. For me, black metal is heavy metal taken to the extreme. The more ambient and darker current that exists in black metal, that Madame Germen might sound like to you, does not really come from black metal.
I think the only black metal band we listened to in those years was Naglfar. Furthermore, I can assure you that those ideologies you mention have never influenced us and will never influence us. There are bad apples even in hardcore punk, machoism, racism and a lot of right-wing and even fascist political ideology. Regardless of the style of music, all these right-wing ideologies you mentioned are piece of shit to us.
Since the band’s active years ended in 2005, what have the members pursued, musically or otherwise? I think you also played in the old-school death metal band Come Back From The Dead and the screamo band Dasein. Are there any ongoing projects that continue the ethos of Madame Germen?
The truth is that it is extremely difficult to get away from music. Currently I am only semi-active with Come Back From The Dead, lifelong bandmates who have been or are in bands like Ekkaia, Asedio, Black Panda, Nashgul, Bokkluk, Use of Abuse… We do not rehearse or play concerts due to various health problems of some of us. You could say Come Back From The Dead is on hiatus, but it is moving forward, we have new songs and several projects in mind. In the past and in the bands I have been part of that have been to record something, I can mention Noxo and Extinción. I was part of other projects like Wendigo or Kebrantahuesos but we didn’t get to record anything. The other members played in Seres, Hongo, Cop on Fire, Exu, Os Novos, Ekkaia, Refuxio, Ictus, Blünt, La Hydra, Black Panda and many more…
Whenever I hear César play guitar, I have the feeling that the spirit of Madame Germen is still alive, because he was the main composer of the songs. At the moment I only know of an acoustic project with video recordings of him called Todos los Cobardes del Valle.
Looking back, how do you feel Madame Germen contributed to the DIY scene and influenced newer bands? As younger people discover your records, what do you hope your legacy will be within the crust punk community?
I was recently told that I was not aware of the stories and mythology that existed around Madame Germen. On a musical level I still believe that we were nothing important… What remains for me is the friendship we created between us, the good times we had and how much we enjoyed each other during those years. That was the most important thing.
I have to say that I personally rejected this style of music completely, and the word “emo” as a prefix to anything caused me so much repulsion that I even got rid of many albums that could be related to this musical genre, in all its forms. I saw that everything became part of a trend, and although there were very good bands, I wasn’t interested in them. Recently I listened to Morrow (UK) and they surprised me again. I’m a menopausal emocrusty, haha!
So for now, with the aim of remembering Madame Germen, I have created an Instagram account to try to collect all kinds of things related to the band like photos, concert posters, flyers, videos, etc… Maybe there will be a new project…
We are looking for all kind of Madame Germen bullshit! To contact us you can write to our email–[email protected] or Instagram @madame.germen.band
