In April 1984 a rock opera with a heavy metal band at its heart opened in a Mexican theatre. It was meant to be the story of Tarzan, until the copyright on the jungle king blocked the way and the hero was renamed Kumán; the producer was the actress Julissa, and the run went on to be staged, by the band's own count, more than five hundred times across the country. The band in the pit, formed in the capital in 1979 and named for crystal and steel, was Cristal y Acero. The pit was the only stage it could get.
A periodical cicada spends seventeen years underground, a white nymph clamped to a tree root in the dark, drinking sap and growing by slow degrees while the lawn above it is mown, dug up and relaid by people who have no idea it is there. Then in a single warm week the whole brood breaks the soil together, splits its own back open on the bark and fills the air with a noise loud enough to drown out the traffic, and a town that had forgotten the date is suddenly ankle deep in shells. The volume was never the surprise. The numbers were.
Mexican heavy metal came up the same way. Pushed off the big stages after the rock festival at Avándaro in 1971 and into makeshift halls on the edge of the capital, the music spent the seventies below the lawn, and in the space of about five years in the middle eighties a whole generation of Mexican heavy metal bands broke the surface together, singing in Spanish, pressing their own records and ripping the foreign import off the top of the pile.
Mexican heavy metal bands before the labels came
The founders of the British and American schools are argued in the chapter above; the Mexicans started from those records and a closed door. Released in 1984 in two versions, the Spanish "Soy un hombre" and the English "I Am a Man", Cristal y Acero's single hedged the bet on which language a Mexican metal band ought to sing in, and the same song came back that year retooled for Kumán.
The theatre was the band's answer to the missing arena. With the large venues shut to rock, a stage with a licence for drama was a stage all the same, and Cristal y Acero wrote heavy metal that could carry a plot, a costume and a curtain call. The band has gone on doing it ever since, from Drácula in 1998 to a King Arthur concert show in 2023. Few followed it there.
The capital band that took its name from a pharaoh and its subjects from war and Egyptian myth was Ramsés, billed as Ramsess on a national rock compilation in 1981, and its Apocalipsis, pressed in March 1985 on the label Comrock, already leaned towards the speed metal that would drive its later records. It was a vanguard with nowhere yet to march. That changed the same year.
Comrock, the Escuadrón and a first night at the Ágora
Two things arrived in 1985. The first was a record label ready to press heavy metal, the independent Comrock, run into a distribution deal with Warner by the guitarist and producer Ricardo Ochoa, and after Apocalipsis the band it chose was Luzbel. The second was a union. The first Escuadrón Metálico, formed by Luzbel, Ramsés, Super Alfa, Apocalipsis and Ultimátum to share stages, equipment and better terms, put on the first all heavy metal bill in the country at the Ágora that year.
Out of that night came a record company. Recorded at Estudios Area in Mexico City in July and August of 1986 and pressed that October on the small label Rosenbach, the compilation Escuadrón metálico (Proyecto uno) put five bands on one slab of vinyl because none of them could yet afford a slab of their own, and the company that grew out of it, Avanzada Metálica, became for a few years the biggest metal label in Mexico.
The Mexico City band that kept one foot in hard rock and put out its debut in 1986 was Ultimátum, the melodic end of the first wave, and No te detengas... in 1989 closed its first life, a generation before the band plugged back in during 2016. It is still playing.
Luzbel, twice
The guitarist who came home to Mexico City in 1982 after two years working the club circuit in England, and a year later built a band around what he had heard there, was Raúl Fernández, known to everyone as Greñas, and the band he founded is Luzbel. With Arturo Huizar singing his own words, the EP Metal caído del cielo in 1985 and the album Pasaporte al infierno in 1986 turned the Spanish lyric from a handicap into an anthem, a fallen angel in the title and a crowd shouting every line back.
A fallen angel in the title and a crowd shouting every line back.
Then the band cracked in two. After years of quarrels and a fight over the name, Huizar formed his own group in 1996, spelled it Lvzbel, played the old songs and sold himself as the continuation, while Greñas kept Luzbel going with other singers. It was a geode split with a hammer: two rough grey halves on the bench, each one carrying the same purple cavity of crystal, and each half's owner swearing the other was only the shell. The audience bought tickets for both.
"Kirieleison", released in 2013 as the band's first new song in years ahead of Regreso al origen, is Greñas's Luzbel reclaiming the old ground, the title alone, lifted from the Mass, telling the old audience which band this is, and the band has kept pressing records since, the most recent Los hijos de Adán in 2024. Arturo Huizar died in April 2020. Lvzbel stopped with him, and has since come back.
Beyond the capital, and the thrash that followed
The Torreón band that carried the style north into Coahuila, far from the halls of the capital, was Megatón, formed in 1986 with a debut album out by 1988, later based in Guadalajara, with a long silence that broke only in 2011. Makina began in 1985 as a heavy metal band in Mexico City, under the name Máquina Negra, before drifting into groove and thrash in the nineties.
Holding much of it together was a label with no interest in fashion. Founded in 1985 by Octavio Aguilera, Discos y Cintas Denver pressed the underground rock the major labels passed over, Luzbel among it, and kept those cassettes and records in print for decades, which is the only reason a chronology of the first wave can be written at all. The chroniclers of the scene lean on its catalogue. There is little else to lean on.
By the end of the decade the young bands were running faster than any of that. Next, formed in 1985, went to thrash with Invasión nuclear in 1988, Transmetal out of Ecatepec cut Muerto en la cruz the same year and carried Mexico into death metal, and Leprosy followed in 1990. They belong to the thrash and death stories, and much of the nineties crowd went with them. The heavy metal bands kept the bastion.
The young Mexican heavy metal bands
| Band | City | Formed | Start with | What it did |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cristal y Acero | Mexico City | 1979 | Kumán (1984) | Took the style into the theatre |
| Ramsés | Mexico City | 1980 | Apocalipsis (1985) | Speed and Egyptian myth |
| Luzbel | Mexico City | 1983 | Pasaporte al infierno (1986) | Made the Spanish lyric stick |
| Ultimátum | Mexico City | 1984 | Ultimátum (1986) | The tuneful end of the first wave |
| Megatón | Torreón | 1986 | Megatón (1988) | Carried it north |
| Jet Jaguar | Cancún | 2014 | Endless Nights (2020) | Took it to a European label |
The Cancún band that plays heavy metal at the tempo of speed metal and named itself after the robot in the Godzilla films is Jet Jaguar, formed in 2014, and it is the clearest sign of how far the lineage has travelled. Zero Hour, its 2016 EP, carried the Spanish-language "Rompiendo el Acero", the band won the 2017 Metal Battle contest and with it a place on the Wacken Open Air stage, and the push that followed put Severance out on the German label Steamhammer in 2025, five years after the debut Endless Nights came out on another German label, Pride and Joy Music.
"Rompiendo el Acero" is the proof that the first wave's bet paid out. A band from a holiday coast on the far side of the country, raised on records pressed before its members were born, sings in the language Luzbel fought for, plays the style Cristal y Acero hauled into a theatre, and has carried both to a German festival stage. Around it, bands like Cemican fold pre-Hispanic instruments into the music, which is folk metal and another shelf.
Every foreign headliner who now fills a Mexican stadium plays to a crowd those bands built in rented halls. The other scene that bet everything on its own language was the French heavy metal bands, singing in French against the grain of the market, a bet that played out very differently there. In Mexico the language won. Every band that followed Luzbel sings to a crowd that already knows the words.
