Everything’s Falling takes the hits but punches back

Let me tell you about June 2025.

I drove to a field in Clisson to watch The Warning play Mainstage at five past three in the afternoon. What I actually did was watch my GPS invent a route through what I can only assume was a parallel France. Forty minutes. Eleven songs. Months of waiting. And I got precisely… none of them. First timer at the Hellfest, I wasn’t made aware that purgatory was included.

To make it even better, ninth of those eleven songs was Hell You Call a Dream, which is more or less the song that got me into this band.

I missed it. At HELLfest. Ha. HA.

Look. I’ve had thirteen months to sit with that one, and it has not become funnier.

Here’s the other thing I should admit up front: The Warning are one of those bands I found through a guest spot on someone else’s song — the feature on Hurt by Dead Poet Society. (If you want to keep laughing, I also missed them at Hellfest. And another time that summer. It was a bad one in terms of traffic.) But look, here I am now.

So that was the debt. A guest spot, a missed set, and a song I’d been owed since 2024.

It took thirteen months and another country to collect.

Algés, 10 July, six in the evening

NOS Alive. Fifteen songs, about an hour, in the kind of early-evening light that makes a thing look like a memory before it’s finished happening.

It was hot. Obviously it was hot, it was July on the Tagus. But the sun didn’t stop a single person jumping, and I’d bet most of us sweated more from the music than from the weather.

The crowd turned up. And that’s always a good surprise at six in the evening, when a festival field can just as easily be three hundred people waiting for somebody else.

And they played three songs from a record that wasn’t out yet: Kerosene and Ego were a few months old, but the third one, Ritual, was at that point four weeks old. FOUR WEEKS. Half that field was hearing it for the second or third time in their lives.

That’s my favourite kind of live moment, and I know it’s a slightly unhinged preference: a song so new that nobody has collectively decided how to feel about it yet. You’re all working it out at the same time, in real time, with the band still finding out too.

Did that make up for last year? Maybe.

Oh. And that one.

Ninth song at Hellfest.

Twelfth at NOS Alive.

Paid.

A quick note about the record, and how I listen to these things

Before we go in: Daniela, Paulina and Alejandra Villarreal, three sisters from Monterrey. And the whole record produced, mixed and engineered by one person, Anton DeLost. Hold on to that last bit. A record this consistent didn’t get that way by accident, and we’re going to come back to what the consistency is doing.

Now. I like hearing the psychology of an album. Not the production, not the gear — I couldn’t tell you what pedal did that and I’d be lying if I tried. I mean the shape of the thing. What it’s about before anybody sings a word.

And Everything’s Falling has a shape. It’s a fight. It’s built exactly like one.

The first half is the punches you take. The second half is where you’ve had enough and start to hit back.

Look at the titles. Just the titles. Perfect Daughter. Everything’s Falling. Why Do You Like It When I Cry? Bite My Tongue. That is the entire vocabulary of being what other people expect you to be — of enduring it, of swallowing it, of saying nothing. And then, at track six, Kill Or Be Killed, which is not just one hell of a mood. It’s an ultimatum.

Everything after that is a different animal.

But let’s take it from the top shall we?

Ritual — that’s what you call an opener. That riff gives you life. And you’re going to need it.

It’s the newest thing I’d heard live and the first thing I heard on the record, which is a strange way round to meet a song. Hearing it in Algés confirmed what I already suspected: this album was going to hit hard, and these three are nowhere near done surprising us.

I was right. I’m always right. I know, not very humble, but I was.

And then the record starts taking its hits.

Perfect Daughter, Everything’s Falling and Why Do You Like It When I Cry? work as a cluster, and I’d rather treat them as one than pretend I have three separate revelations. Perfect Daughter sets the terms and the other two live inside them. They’re good songs. They’re well made. But there’s none of the spite you find later on — they’re strangely contained, almost well-behaved, and I’ve gone back and forth on whether that bothers me or whether it’s the whole point.

I think it’s the latter. Being well-behaved is the subject. You can’t write the first act of getting out from under something and have it snarl, without an intro. If you listen close enough, those songs sound like the cogs inside your brain fighting real hard to keep a smile on your face when you just really want to throw a few punches.

One of those three won’t leave me alone, though.

Everything’s Falling itself is a beautiful ballad, and there’s a stronger feeling moving underneath it. I can hear it down there, and I just wanted it to come out and say so. Not asserted enough for my taste. Everyone else seems to love it, so take that as one woman’s ear and not a verdict.

Bite My Tongue is the second one I keep wanting more from, and here’s where I got stuck for a while, because it echoes its own title. Muted song called Bite My Tongue. Is that a weakness or is it genius?

I’ve decided it’s neither, quite. The title hands it an alibi. I’m not sure the song earns it. But maybe with time I’ll accept it.

Five tracks of swallowing it.

Kill Or Be Killed is the swallow failing and a song that starts snarling.

It lands on the switch, and it is the feeling rather than a description of it. No third option left, choose. There’s a kind of strength that only turns up once you’ve been backed into a corner. You don’t find out what you’re made of while there’s still a way out.

And with their backs against the wall, that’s when the sisters start moving forward.

Ego is where the record answers back, and it does it in Spanish. Fuck yeah.

Their first language. And it hits as hard as anything they’ve done in English — maybe harder. That’s strong. That’s a real thing to do, five albums in, on a major label, with an international audience that mostly doesn’t speak it. They’ve talked about what it means to put a song out in the language they grew up in, and about this one as standing in your own identity while the world watches — which is more or less the entire second half of this record, said out loud.

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And I got to hear it in Portugal, a few weeks old, in front of a crowd whose own language lives right next door. That closeness is always a bonus from where I’m standing. Spanish and Portuguese in the same field, nobody needing a translation to start kicking whoever’s arse deserves it. Only makes sense that the counter-punch lands in the language they fight in. And as a bilingual, you know it’s only natural to revert to it when you’ve had enough. Still tracks.

And then the next one comes in laughing and you know you’re on for a good time.

Bloodsport has actual laughs tucked into it, fitting that teasing quality the whole song runs on — and they change the temperature of everything that follows. Because it means they’re enjoying this. The counter-punch comes with a grin.

Which is a much better kind of defiance than the grim one. And the title gets there before we even do: a blood sport is violence turned into entertainment. They’re making a sport of it now. Ha. Go girls.

Also: the bridge brings the fight back. Hold that thought, I’m coming back for it.

And then they put the gloves down. At least for a minute.

It’s all in the title. Break has a real tenderness sitting under those guitars. Lovely song. This is the record exhaling, and honestly, so did I.

Everything runs at a thousand miles an hour, all the time, and every one of us needs to slow down and take a break in the middle of the chaos. That is the most useful thing this album does, and it does it by putting one entire track aside to do nothing else.

Break is the only three minutes of this record that aren’t a fight. Bruises makes you pay for them.

It’s dark, and then that bridge arrives, and it’s almost a tease of rebellion. It’s excellent. And it’s almost familiar, which bothered me for about a day until I worked out why.

It isn’t musical. It’s the voice in your own head — the one that turns up the second you switch into I’ll show you mode.

You know that voice. I know that voice. It’s got a very specific sound.

Waste Your Time On Me runs the same play — build, build, and then the unexpected drop — and by now you’ve noticed, because I’ve noticed, and because it is not an accident.

Which leaves one.

Kerosene closes the album full of spite. Full circle with the opener: Ritual is dread, something’s coming and you can’t stop it. Kerosene is something came, they’re still here, and they’re definitely not having it.

These women are mad mad and ready to set everything on fire if needed.

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So here’s the argument

You’ll have read that this record repeats itself. That the songs are built the same way, over and over.

And it isn’t a rumour. Press and public agrees on that, and the three complaints that keep coming back are a lack of variety, a step down from the last one, filler between the peaks. That gap is real and somebody should explain it rather than pick a side.

So: they are built the same way. I’m not going to pretend otherwise — I heard it too, and denying it would just mean I wasn’t listening.

It isn’t repetition. It’s coherence. It’s a statement.

Because it’s the same fight at two scales. The album takes its punches for five tracks, turns around at Kill Or Be Killed, and hits back like a mofo for six. And every individual song does the same thing in three minutes: verse, chorus, build, build — the break — and then the bridge, where it swings.

The bridges are where the fight-back lives. Bruises. Bloodsport. Waste Your Time On Me. Every time.

And this is the bit that got me.

The bridges are also where their voices come together.

It’s a team. They’re sisters. They hold each other up — and they do it at the exact structural moment where the record stops taking it and starts hitting back.

So the answer this album gives to being pushed to the wall isn’t grit. Everyone’s calling it resilience and then stopping there, and resilience is a word you can put on anything.

The answer is: you don’t punch back alone.

Perfect daughter. Bite my tongue. Endure. You do all of that by yourself, which is exactly why the first half feels so contained. And then every bridge after track six is three voices instead of one.

That’s not a production choice. That’s Daniela, Paulina and Alejandra backing each other up at the precise second it costs something.

The one objection I can actually answer

Some reviews bit properly, reckoning the production “sands off the edge that made them theirs” — the vocal over-filtered, the choruses sounding calculated rather than found. “Streaming aesthetics”, is the phrase.

Let’s agree to disagree, at the very least for three of them.

Ritual, Ego and Kerosene I heard in a field in Algés with nothing at all between them and me. No studio, no filter, no second take, no way to hide. They were punchy. They landed. Whatever the record does or doesn’t do to those songs, they did not lose anything on the way in.

That isn’t me telling you the critics are wrong. It’s me telling you the one thing I’m actually good at that : go see for yourselves.

And while we’re here

This album is a proper slap — the good kind — for anyone who still thinks three women can’t kick their arses.

Although. I don’t know that they’ve still got anything to prove about deserving that stage. Five albums in, and we’re still handing them the exam. Maybe the question was always the problem.

They’re ready to fight for it tooth and nail anyway. Cruel world, harsh realities, and they’re here for it.

Badass as fuck.

And if the structure reminds you of the earlier records — it did for me — I don’t think that’s a musical thing. I think it’s attitude. The fight has always been there. This time they built the songs in its shape.

One hour was never going to be enough

They’ve announced the Everything’s Falling World Tour, and it opens somewhere that tells you exactly how far these three have got: Estadio GNP Seguros, Mexico City, 5 February. Their first headline stadium show, at home.

Europe in March. Madrid on the 9th, Barcelona on the 10th, then France, Italy, Austria, Czechia, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, before four UK dates that finish at the OVO Arena Wembley on 2 April — the biggest headline show they’ve played here.

Nothing in my neck of the woods, but I can’t blame them, they were literally just here in July. What can I say. Can’t really get enough of these girls. Don’t miss out people and make sure to not let your GPS get in the way.