On November 13, the new Los Punsetes album will be released, bearing the evocative title “A River of Unbridled Anguish.” “A Sad Person,” which came out a few months ago, will be track 2, and the new single being released now, “The Year of the Horse,” will be track 3. This is our Song of the Day today.
“The Year of the Horse” is a track that doesn’t need any footnotes on Genius, given how self-explanatory it is. It’s the standard formula of songwriters who say, “Screw your friends” or “Don’t go a day without giving your crappy opinion.”
The composition tells of someone who starts “the day with anxiety” and ends up drunk, his head spinning “a thousand times” but finding nothing that’s worth it. He wonders: “what’s been happening to me lately / I’m scared all the time / Of dying suddenly.”
With allusions to things that have happened this 2026, the Year of the Horse in the Chinese zodiac, such as the eclipse, the track also leans into the esoteric. Especially through a video that begins with a card reading and then ventures into a fair. We see Metallica, Mago de Oz or Extremoduro T-shirts, perhaps reflecting the darkness of the lyrics of this mid-tempo number stamped with the Punsetes’ brand.
The press release frames this malaise in relation to the collapse of the West and mentions “the ecological collapse, police violence and Twitter” as causes. Perhaps we could add Palestine, Iran, the threat of unregulated runaway AI, or insert here whatever currently unsettles you the most. It positions Los Punsetes as pioneers in portraying all of this. This is the text from Sonido Muchacho:
«It’s visible to everyone: the West is collapsing. Los Punsetes have spent two decades analyzing it better than any analyst on TV, and their songs have taken us through all the neuroses of our time, from ecological collapse or police violence to the Twitter discourse of the moment. All the lies of the consumer society that they themselves unmasked have fallen by their own weight; here no one is being fooled anymore. When there is nothing left to cling to in the material world, we will have to return to magical thinking: essential oils, rosary beads, and, of course, the classic horoscope at the end of the newspaper. Health: bad. Money: bad. Love: bad».
The new Punsetes album has been produced by Paco Loco and Los Punsetes and features the mix by Sergio Pérez García (Svper) and mastering by Greg Obis (MJ Lenderman, Slow Pulp, Duster…) at Chicago Mastering Service.
