Ansonia Records, the mythical Latin music record label based in New York, resumes its activity 30 years after releasing its last album. For this special occasion, they signed the band Meridian Brothers, who released the single "Metamorfosis", the first song of their next album.

Founded in 1949, the label was dedicated to promoting classic Latin sounds in the north American city. Its catalog includes countless references to merengue, jíbara music, plena, bomba, danza, son, guajira, bolero, mambo, guaracha, cha-cha-cha or pachanga. This independent label promoted big names like Celia Cruz, Ismael Rivera, Arsenio Rodríguez or Noro Morales to fame.

The Meridian Brothers, a group founded in Bogotá (1998), are known for mixing different musical styles and electronic experiments, with a certain psychedelic touch. It fuses popular Caribbean rhythms such as salsa, cumbia or vallenato with traditional Colombian rhythms. In “Metamorfosis”, they practice a hard salsa, with a frenetic tempo that invites you to shake your hips.

To promote the song, they opted to design an original clip based on hand-drawn drawings, which illustrate the party that breaks out during a live performance. It goes from general shots where you see the group acting, to detailed shots of enthusiastic attendees. The lyrics are marked by the constant use of metaphors. “Brother of the future I come looking for enlightenment, with a grass bath I will escape transhumation”, several voices sing in the chorus.

{"preview_thumbnail":"/sites/default/files/styles/video_embed_wysiwyg_preview/public/video_thumbnails/rQ-a3NymnGI.jpg?itok=LgOsgs4J","video_url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ-a3NymnGI","settings":{"responsive":1,"width":"854","height":"480","autoplay":1},"settings_summary":["Embedded Video (Responsive, autoplaying)."]}

“Metamorfosis” is a combination of guaracha with the Cuban montuno rhythm. The Kafkaesque style of the song and video clip is an exploration of transhumanism. Despite the joy of its beats, it is an implicit criticism of a robotic and computerized world, where aspects as elementary as love or care have been dominated by digitization and the excessive dominance of social networks.

Singer Eblis Álvarez, who initially started the group as a solo project and began recruiting musicians in 2009, pretends that “Metamorfosis” will save them from this dystopian future, where “technology surpasses humanity”. The unresolved question is if salvation will be possible, or whether humanity will end up succumbing to the digital avalanche.

The complete album that will be released on August 5th -will be available on vinyl- is a tribute to the lost sounds of salsa dura. According to the band, it will be a "Class B" work, since it will deal with social problems such as urban gentrification, police brutality, social marginalization or addictions.

Meridian Brothers “collaborated” with the now-defunct El Grupo Renacimiento in Isaac Newton's studio in Bogotá. The will of Eblis Álvarez was to rescue the songs of this mythical band, to re-record them and present them live. Therefore, the new album will be called "Meridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimiento". For the graphic illustration, they counted with Glenda Torrado and Mateo Rivano.