Soda Stereo Says An Unreleased Song Is on the Way
The remaining members of Soda Stereo are looking back at the band’s storied career and teasing a never-before-heard song. In a new interview with Billboard, the Argentine rockers revealed that they’ll soon drop a song they discovered was hidden in the vault.
During the interview, drummer Charly Alberti wouldn’t share the song’s name but said he discovered the track on a tape that included a different version of their first album’s first song, “Por Qué No Puedo Ser del Jet Set?” Alberti shared how the song’s lyrics “talk about a kid who stares at the sky” and someone who’s “very youthful” and “very naive.” “It was the first thing we did,” he said.
Alberti teased that they were going to do “a little mastering” on the track, but will skip doing another mix on it. “The audio is quite good,” he said. “I think it would lose the essence of what it means.”
“It’s important that people understand how we started, how the band sounded in that moment,” he added. “Obviously, [we’ll] arrange it to a more current sound, but not much more.”
The interview with Soda Stereo’s Alberti and Zeta Bosio coincides with the 40th anniversary of the band’s self-titled debut album, which dropped in 1984. The duo reflected on their heyday and how their music appealed to young people “uninterested” in Latin music and more into acts like U2, the Cure, and the Police. (The group’s frontman, Gustavo Cerati, died in 2014 at age 55.)
“About the songs, it was very particular — because, as a matter of fact, the songs would come out from the three of us together,” Alberti told Billboard. “We composed and made song bases all the time, we rehearsed all week long, including Saturdays and Sundays, and the song bases were coming from those rehearsals. And Gustavo would add the melody and the lyrics to those bases to finish the songs.”
Last year, the band was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Latin Recording Academy. The group broke up in 1997 after seven albums and multiple tours. Rolling Stone ranked Soda Stereo’s Canción Animal, their fifth album, as the 16th-best Latin-American rock album of all time, while Cerati’s solo LP Bocanada landed in the second spot.