Formed in 2017, Diles Que No Me Maten is a Mexico City five-piece collective whose music dissolves genre boundaries. Their songs snake back and forth between post-rock atmospheres, experimental spiritual jazz stylings, indie rock drones, and Cuban- and Krautrock-inspired rhythms.
“The whole way we move as a band has always been improvised,” bassist Andrés Lupone explained. “We sort of have plans or ideas, but those plans change every time. Our way to work is just to face whatever the world gives us and do something about it with the strengths and weaknesses that we have as individuals. That’s the ethos of the band.”
Brothers Raúl and Gerardo Ponce play drums and guitar, respectively, and they are joined by Jerónimo Elizondo-García on guitar and clarinet, Andrés Lupone on bass, and vocalist and saxophonist Jonás Derbez. Together they create shape-shifting compositions through mind-melding improvisation. The group first made a big splash in 2021 with their second album, La Vida de Alguien Más, and they have continued to make waves with 2023’s Obrigaggi and their mind-blowing new album Escrito en Agua.
“In terms of the music, it always has been improvised,” Lupone said. “We have different musical tastes, and we never agree to do a song in the style of this or that. It’s just what comes with different influences. For example, I like post-rock, but I’m the only member that really likes post-rock music, and therefore my contributions to a song can sound like Godspeed You! Black Emperor or something. But the way the others interact with that is not post-rock at all because of the way the overall song shifts through group improvisation.”
Diles Que No Me Maten evolved slowly, in a chill way that made the band feel like an informal side project, until it grew into the central project in their lives. Their name means “Tell them not to kill me” in English, and it is based on a short story by Mexican writer Juan Rulfo about a man about to be executed during the Mexican Revolution. But the band members were more interested in how the words sounded together.
“We didn’t choose the name because of political reasons, even though it can be interpreted like that,” Lupone said. “Of course, everything you do is political. Every action you make is political. But we didn’t choose the name because we wanted to make this big statement or something. It’s just a combination of five words that really resonate with us and resonates with a lot of Mexican and Spanish-speaking people as well.”
Latin America has a long history of dictatorships and narcotrafficking, causing much bloodshed. Lupone pointed out that Mexico City — the band’s homebase and the most populous city in North America — was once Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztecs, a pretty bloody civilization. “On top of that, you have the Spanish conquering us and killing the people, and now a lot of people are killed as well in Mexico. That’s a reality. [They’re] being disappeared and killed every day by drug dealers or just from crime itself, plus a lot of domestic violence as well.”
Escrito en Agua was recorded in the Santa María la Ribera area of Mexico City in a big house where painters and other artists had studios. The band rented a room and worked on finalizing the recorded versions of compositions they developed with their longtime producer and collaborator Sebastián Rojas, also a composer.
“We rented this empty room, and were surrounded by painters, not musicians,” Lupone said. “It was weird for the painters to hear an album being worked out in the flesh. I think some of them got sick of the noise as well — which is understandable, yeah — but it was nice to do it in a space that wasn’t music-oriented. For this album and the last album, we built an improvised studio with our own equipment. With this album in particular, we decided to involve Sebastián Rojas with the pre-production of the album, not just with recording the songs, but having him listen to the rough ideas and try to shape them together. We didn’t use really fancy equipment for it.”
Diles Que No Me Maten has known Rojas since the beginning. He was around when the band started, went to all their first shows and shared the same rehearsal space. They’ve grown to trust him as a friend and collaborator.
“Sometimes as a band, we like to be a democracy, but you cannot always find common ground for every decision,” Lupone said. “So, Sebastián was kind of the catalyst for that. We were trusting his vision to decide what works and what doesn’t work within songs, within arrangements, within textures, et cetera. That’s how we built the songs together.”
Escrito en Agua’s opening track, “Las noches que dormimos en sillas,” is an instrumental that Lupone originally conceived as a sort of goth Duke Ellington composition, because it was meant to have baritone saxophones that would give it a doomy low-end vibe. However, neither a baritone nor tenor sax were available during the recording session. So they transposed the song up an octave so that it could be played on a clarinet, alto saxophone and tenor sax.
“I first imagined it as a low register piece, and it sounded gothic. Then it started sounding kind of like this Klezmer thing, which is higher because Klezmer music tends to be a higher register, and then we added this funeral march thing to it.”
The band’s commitment to improvisation, which grounds their music, extends to the way they work together and interface with the world. Though they work with two booking agencies, they don’t have the money or infrastructure to hire roadies, so they have developed a division of labor for things that come up on tour. Three band members drive so they don’t have to employ a professional driver, and Lupone takes on most of the tour managing duties. Jonás Derbez does more general band management stuff, and the others pitch in with their own strengths.
“There’s a lot of improvisation with the logistical stuff,” Lupone said, “because you’re not able to plan everything that happens. So, sometimes you improvise where to sleep — a Motel 6 or someone’s house or an Airbnb. On tour, there’s a lot of improvising and going with the flow. But even though we have different roles and sometimes one of us has bigger responsibilities, we still are a really democratic band. We always move as a unity, whether it’s creatively, musically or just, like, taking on decisions. That’s why, when we play on stage, there is no front person, side person, or the drummer in the back. We’re all playing in this half circle, looking at each other, because we prioritize looking at each other on stage.”
Event details:
Diles Que No Me Maten w/ Mr. Softheart, xBk Live, Sunday, Nov. 1, 6 p.m.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2026 issue.
