MAQUINA. - BODY TRANSMISSION

MAQUINA. embody all the sweaty togetherness and euphoria a collective music experience has to offer. The buzzy Lisbon trio have been getting punks to dance and club kids to pogo – “making the bubbles connect a little bit” – with such fervour they routinely pack out venues and inspire multiple waves of crowdsurfing at any given live show, with over 250 gigs and numerous festival appearances across Europe already under their belt. Still on a high after their first tour of Brazil and KEXP performance as part of Trans Musicales 2025, the three-piece ring in a new chapter with their second LP BODY TRANSMISSION: a headbanging trip through high-energy noise-rock, motorik metal, and industrial punk that doesn’t stop moving.

Bottling the raw power of their now-legendary live shows, BODY TRANSMISSION – co-produced by the band alongside Hugo Valverde – arrives following MAQUINA.’s 2024 debut PRATA, also released on Fuzz Club and largely driven by improvisation, locking itself into the flow state of a live performance. For their new full-length, the band – Halison Peres (drums/vocals), José "Mendy" Rego (bass), and João Cavalheiro (guitar/effects) – opted for less jamming and more “editing”, taking time to mull over the direction of each track while also looking to condense 10-minute meanders into three or four-minute “bangers” that slap.

The result is a full-body rush geared towards the dancefloor with “no breaks”; a club-ready rock record steered by the trio’s guitar, drums, and bass combo. “It was the most challenging and fun we’ve ever had in the studio because we pushed ourselves to write songs rather than just capturing jams,” say the band. “We wanted it to feel heavy, focused, and relentless. We kept the tempo up and the energy peaking – it’s an 'always-on' record.”

They don’t waste any time getting started. “dança” – which features bratty punk singing from Silvia Konstance, swapping her native Italian here for Portuguese, and synths from Viktor L. Crux, both of Barcelona-biased duo Dame Area – sets up the heartbeat of the record, all relentlessly propulsive 4/4, feral shrieking, and a smoking guitar line that cuts through the three-note bass riff with searing focus. This party-popping opener, pumped and primed to turn heads and get the blood flowing, crashes like a bumper car into “4-to-the-floor”: three minutes of heavy riffage and thumping beats that wears its dance music influences on its mesh-top sleeve. “pressure/pleasure” and “out of fear”, meanwhile, are both partying under the same strobe lights, through a backbone of chuggy, thrashy guitar that continues on instrumental track “simulation”.

That trance-inducing, never-stops-for-air quality also owes something to Arise – Sepultura’s 1991 landmark LP, on repeat during the making of BODY TRANSMISSION. On “collapsing”, Peres’s raw-throated metal screams and roars – appearing in dialogue with his clean or shouty vocals (“Doing nothing / feeling everything”) – draw from this lineage, while highlighting the expressive dynamics that function as the record’s guiding aesthetic principles. Schwefelgelb, Fugitive, and Section 25 were also getting heavy rotation at the time and surface throughout the record; successfully managing to weave the unexpected threads between that respective sounding board of techno/EBM, thrash metal and early electronic post-punk.

Elsewhere, “agony” is equally unapologetic in its delivery, both snarling and visceral – fitting for a politically charged lightning bolt written during our current moment of intense global conflict. “False speech / is belief / is distraction / to deceive,” spits Peres, reminding us that art cannot be created in a vacuum. “It’s about the false speech that politicians always try to push, towards some enemy or something, to deceive what they really want to do,” reflects Peres of the track, which depicts a ‘no man’s land’ where humanity finds itself stranded amid misery and chaos. “It’s hard to be quiet in moments like this. So if I have a channel that I can use to do something good, then I will do it,” he says.