The Warning’s Everything’s Falling Is a Reckoning Built in a Monterrey Basement

The Warning’s Everything’s Falling, due 28 August, arrives as the Villarreal sisters’ most pointed statement yet: a 12-track hard rock record that transforms a decade of accumulated frustration into something very close to armour. Recorded for Spotify‘s listed release under Republic Records, a division of UMG Recordings, Inc., and Lava Music, the album is technically the band’s fifth, and their third for the Lava/Republic partnership they entered in 2020.

The Warning’s Everything’s Falling and the Shape of Its Anger

The record’s cover art frames the Villarreals as mythological Greek heroines, and that register carries into the music. The lead single ‘Ritual’, filmed in the white sand dunes and marble ruins of the Cuatro Ciénegas oasis in the northern Mexican state of Coahuila, casts Daniela, Paulina and Alejandra as sacrificial figures who die, earn their wings and return to be worshipped. Behind the visual spectacle, as the band explained in a press release for the single, is something more inward: ‘the fear about losing something good. Even when life is going well, anxiety can convince you that disaster is right around the corner. It’s about getting trapped in those thoughts and letting them keep you from actually living in the moment.’

That anxiety is understandable in context. Since signing with Lava/Republic, the Warning has accumulated nearly a billion career streams, Latin Grammy nominations, co-signs from Metallica, MTV VMAs appearances and international tours with Muse, Foo Fighters and Guns N’ Roses. The fear that it might evaporate is, in a way, the engine of the record.

‘Perfect Daughter’, an alt-metal confessional, addresses the pressure of womanhood with uncomfortable specificity. Pau is careful to note the song is not about her parents, Luis and Mónica, whom she describes as ‘wonderful’. ‘The song is about turning from a girl to a woman,’ she says. ‘Being a woman is such a specific experience where we are pushed towards perfection all the time, whether it be as a sister, a daughter, a mother, a girlfriend, whatever it is. We always have to perform perfectly to have value and sometimes those expectations are not doable.’

The album’s most ferocious moment may be ‘Ego’, written and sung in Spanish. While the Warning has long conducted most of its music in English, the sisters have returned to their native language on a handful of tracks, including 2024’s ‘Qué Más Quieres’, which earned their first Latin Grammy nomination. ‘Ego’ pushes further. ‘I think “Ego” is the first time we have allowed ourselves to be angry in Spanish,’ Pau explains, ‘and it’s by far one of the heaviest and angriest songs that we’ve ever written. We rarely allow ourselves to be angry women. But in this song, in Spanish, it just feels super personal and very liberating.’

From a Monterrey Basement to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

The story of how three sisters from Monterrey reached this point runs through a shared iPod loaded with Hannah Montana and Kelly Clarkson, a borrowed fascination with the video game Rock Band, and a 2014 cover of Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’ filmed in a basement rehearsal room when Daniela, Paulina and Alejandra were 14, 12 and 9 respectively. Kirk Hammett saw the clip after Lollapalooza posted it in 2015 and left a ‘kick ass’ comment, setting off a chain of events that included an appearance on ‘The Ellen DeGeneres Show’ and a scholarship to an accelerated programme at Berklee College of Music. By 2021, they were recording ‘Enter Sandman’ officially, with Alessia Cara, for the tribute album The Metallica Blacklist.

Their parents, neither of them musicians, managed those early years carefully. Most early offers were declined. The sisters self-released XXI Century Blood in 2017 and Queen of the Murder Scene in 2018 before Lava/Republic entered the picture. Luis remains one of the Warning’s managers. All three sisters still live at home in Monterrey, a city Pau describes simply as home: ‘We were born and raised in Mexico. We still live in Mexico. The more I travel, the more my love for my country grows.’

That connection has found public expression in several recent moments, including a collaboration with norteño artist Carín León on ‘Love to Be Loved’, a sold-out concert film and live album from the Auditorio Nacional in Mexico City, and a donation of dresses worn to the 2024 Latin Grammys to the ‘Women in Metal: You Will Know My Name’ exhibit at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Lzzy Hale, who in 2022 crashed the Warning’s opening set on a Halestorm tour and gifted Daniela a custom Gibson Explorer guitar, helped christen that same exhibit.

United Talent Agency signed the Warning to its roster in May, the latest institutional vote of confidence for a band that has spent the summer touring with Yungblud and is now heading to Japan and Korea, the latter for the first time. Everything’s Falling closes with ‘Kerosene’, in which the sisters arrive with flamethrowers and a direct instruction: ‘look in my eyes when you’re talking to me.’ On current evidence, most people will.