BONES OF MINERVA
Photograph Credit: Tumulus Design
Q1. For readers who may not be familiar with the band, could you please provide some background on yourselves—where you’re from, when you formed, etc.?
We are a Spanish band formed by Eustaquia (singer), Ruth (guitar), Nerea (drums) and Chloé (bass). Our music is kind of like a chimera in that it has a lot of different elements to it (metal, progressive, alternative..), we just like to do whatever sounds good to us. We started playing together as teenagers around 2013 in Eustaquia’s basement (which was really fun) and in 2016 we recorded our first album, Blue Mountains (2017, La Rubia Producciones/ Nooirax). We are really grateful for the repercussion it had because we managed to play in the big festivals here in Spain like Download Fest Madrid and Resurrection Fest, and toured a lot over here. When the pandemic started we had to stop touring, so we could finally concentrate on writing our second album, Embers (2022, Aloud Music/La Rubia Producciones).
Q2. What made you want to form a band and pursue it in the manner that you have?
Ruth, Eustaquia and I (Chloé) have been friends since we were kids and always enjoyed similar music and wanted to have a band together and tour. We’ve always made music our priority and consider it our main job, although we all have side jobs to support ourselves. We all (including Nerea) are very lucky because we have very musical and supportive families and we could spend time learning how to play instruments and such.
Q3. What are some of your main influences?
Our influences have varied since we started the band, but Tool is one of the ones that have stayed with us since the beginning. Deftones, Mastodon or Gojira for example have influenced our music and other artists such as Florence and the Machine have influenced the vocals.
Q4. Your artwork—your albums’ cover art for example—is exceptional. Who is responsible for the concept and execution?
Thank you very much! We are really proud of the artwork of the band. Eustaquia and Ruth are both trained artists, Eustaquia is a tattoo artist and Ruth is an illustrator and comic colourist, and they’re responsible for all the art that we have in Bones, the covers and most of our T-shirt designs. They work a lot to be able to illustrate all that the band means to us in images and art. Although sometimes we like to take some work off their shoulders and work with other amazing artists like Rita Booh, Natalia Velarde or Álvaro Cubero.
Q5. You recently released “Sky.” Can you walk us through it a little bit—the themes you explore, the sound of it, etc.?
We’re currently working on writing our next album and are very excited! We wrote Sky because we wanted to release a song before the tour we had in October supporting Svalbard, so we got in the studio and recorded it very quickly. It was a very fun process; we mixed a lot of ideas and are very happy with how it turned out. We don’t know right now exactly how the new album is going to sound but we’re really excited with the writing process.
We released our last album Embers in 2022 and it’s an album where we explored different subjects and we kind of consolidated our sound and the type of songs that we wanted to write moving forward. In this album there are more atmospheric songs, more metal-y ones and more progressive ones. Some of the songs of that album were recorded during lockdown in 2020 so there’s that at-home-locked aspect where you use day to day elements to get inspired, like Merula, which started from a birds’ song. Other songs are about grief and loss, and some are about hope and fighting for what you want and never giving up. A mix of everything haha, but in the end that’s what Bones of Minerva is, we all bring different and personal aspects to the music.
Q6. What was the writing and recording process for that album like?
Embers had a different writing process because we wrote almost all of it during the pandemic. Ruth, Eustaquia and I (Chloé) were roommates at the time so we could get together to play and write music, but Nerea was living in a different province so even when the lockdown ended, restrictions meant the four of us couldn’t rehearse together and write new music in person. We'd write a basic "skeleton" of a song and share it over Telegram with the others so everyone could chip in and bring their own elements to the song. Some songs were written completely by one person, others started as a riff and everyone contributed parts of it… We didn’t really have just one way to do things. It was intense but very interesting and we had to think more about each song and what we brought to the table to make life easier for the others.
We recorded it at Metropol Studios here in Madrid and we decided with our producer, Alex Cappa, to record it live. All of us except Eustaquia were in one big room, and she was in a smaller room next to us separated by a glass window. It was basically like we were playing together in our rehearsal space. It was a very interesting and enriching experience but it was also very demanding. You want to play your part perfectly, but you also have to listen to your bandmates and pay attention to them. You see them looking at you and everyone is focused on their own playing but also on listening to the others and supporting them when everything gets too overwhelming.
Q7. How has your sound and your approach to the band changed since you began?
I would say that we’re more mature now; we know what we want and how we want it. We’ve found our sound and even if we like to have outside opinions, we’re the masters of our band and our sound and that’s never going to change.
Q8. What are some of the most memorable shows or festivals you’ve played or tours you’ve been a part of?
Last summer we played at ArcTanGent and it was a dream come true! It was amazing, we got to play at one of our favorite festivals and got to meet a lot of amazing people. It was part of a tour in the UK for 10 days which was really intense but so cool. And then, thanks to playing in the festival, we met our current booker and went on tour supporting Svalbard in Germany and France and it was so awesome. We enjoyed it a lot and we have learned a lot too.
I (Chloé) personally would say that playing Resurrection Fest in 2019 was the moment where I finally realized that this was going the right way and we were achieving all that we had worked so hard for. It was also the first big festival where I went as a teenager (with Ruth and Eustaquia too haha) so being able to play on a stage that I had known for almost 9 years at that time was amazing.
Q9. What are some of the future plans of and/or directions you’d like to take for Bones of Minerva?
We’re currently working on our next album (hopefully it will be out later this year!) and we will be touring in Spain and Europe this spring. We can’t wait to go back to the UK and hopefully play in many new places.