MakeWar

About

Photo by: David Toquica For most bands, making music is therapy. It’s a cliché, but clichés are clichés for a reason—because they’re usually true. It’s fair to say that that was the same for MakeWar , too. Formed out of the ashes of frontman Jose Prieto’s solo endeavor, Sad And French , the Brooklyn trio—completed by bassist Edwin Santacruz, and new drummer Alejandro Serritiello —have always worn their hearts on their sleeves. Heartbreak, despair, and alcohol have long been at the center of those struggles, and the songs themselves are a way to push through all of that. Whether it was 2015’s eponymous record—full band reinventions and re-recordings of Sad And French songs—2016’s first album proper, Developing A Theory Of Integrity , or 2019’s Get It Together , MakeWar’s albums have all been intensely cathartic affairs that bristle with the promise and the terror of the human experience. In other words: they’re therapy. It still sounds like that’s the case on A Paradoxical Theory Of Change . Perhaps more than ever, in fact. But it’s not. Because for the last three years or so, Prieto has been undergoing actual therapy—which is where a lot of the ideas on the record stem from. “ Developing A Theory Of Integrity was very party-involved,” he explains. “We made it when we were very young and it’s all about drinking your problems away. But A Paradoxical Theory Of Change talks about how if you really want or need change in your life, instead of fighting or pushing against whatever it is that you’re feeling, you should absorb it, accept it and let it be. It’s there for a reason, and once you acknowledge that you’re living with this problem, you can actually mold it. You have to let it be and not fuck with it so you can finally find change.” In many ways, that’s the total opposite of MakeWar’s initial purpose. As the name suggests, the band was started as a way for Prieto to, as he puts it, “literally fight all these problems that I had in my head, all this depression and an