A Mikel Izal (Pamplona, 1982) a long and intense day of promotion awaits you. She orders a Coca-Cola and drinks from the glass with ice with the pleasure of a thirsty person. “I need some gas,” she admits. His Friday plan is to present at the Ateneo de Madrid his first solo album, Fear and paradise, which means facing the public and the press again after the idyllic marriage with his group Izal ended in October 2022 “due to simple professional concerns.” “I am a musician who needs to move a lot for better and worse because, well, it is exhausting sometimes. But movement is a good engine, a good gasoline. It makes you respond to stimuli, not settle for anything,” she explains.
Together with Alejandro Jordá, Emanuel Pérez “Gato”, Alberto Pérez and Iván Mella, the vocalist and composer led for more than a decade one of the pop rock groups indie more important of the national panorama. The time has come to say goodbye and look for new emotions. “Of course I will miss them, but from a beautiful place. We ended up as a couple that ended well. We needed some time to rest, and personally I had an infinite desire to start new projects,” he says.
What has changed in the Mikel Izal of Fear and paradise Regarding your previous jobs? “I wanted to use synthesizers, electric drums, take some of the prominence away from the guitar. When preparing the demos, I went very crazy looking for things that interested me. The sound that has been fascinating me in the last two or three years is much more Bon Iver, Jack Garrat o James Blake. “They all coexist on the album, it’s less classic than what I was used to doing.”
Izal is worried that everything will turn out perfect. Furthermore, he worries about what people might think about him. He confesses, in this regard, that he has been working on his mental health for some time. “Ever since I was little, it tormented me when someone in class said that he was an idiot, even though we didn’t even get along,” he laughs to ease the tension. He is obsessive, meticulous and demanding. That’s why he has invested more than two years in writing and publishing an album that is “extremely intimate and personal, product of the soul and the viscera“. Also a product of the adverse experiences it has faced in the last five years, such as the accusations of alleged sexual harassment which some media echoed in 2018 and for which he received a public lynching, he says, “unjustified.”
To every controversy, the artist responds through songs, the language he best masters. He assures that there is “one truth” and that “no matter how much they talk, nothing changes.” They are verses from the song that is titled just like that, The truth, where he uses metaphors to talk about dissonances and distortions. What is the only truth you are referring to? “That of the real world: that of my family and my friends, that of the people who know me and know what I am, with my virtues and my defects. So far, no colleague has given me a warning for being an unbearable , that would really alarm me.” The musician claims to know how to make light of his mistakes and always keep the positive: “99% of the things said about me are wonderful, there are 1% horrible. If I believe them all, I run the risk of self-idealizing, and that is as harmful as blaming myself. I am not a special being; In fact, I’m probably the least special being in the universe. “Everything is better in its right measure.”