(We venture off our usual beaten paths today with the following very engaging interview conducted by Comrade Aleks with a member of the Puerto Rican band Moths, whose progressive metal goes off in very interesting and often unexpected directions.)
Things happen and it’s difficult to support each new release in time, but I believe that it’s better late than never, and today I’m belatedly announcing that Puerto Rican experimental outfit Moths have a second full-length album Septem, with each track of that dedicated to one of the seven sins. The idea isn’t new, but its execution sounds unique. I can’t say the same about the lyrics, however, as they pose the issue directly, without any frills, and yet the Moths’ essence is quite unusual.
The casual and flirtatious folk prelude “Sloth” could be anything but a prelude to a metal album. However, with “Envy,” electric guitar takes over, and the listener is treated to avant-garde and progressive witchy heavy rock. Moths’ new vocalist, Mariel Viruet, previously fronted a local tribute band and performed in a jazz band. Here, she showcases both trained jazz and extreme vocals, effortlessly channeling the track’s hard rock intensity.
“Greed” bursts in unexpectedly hard, predatory, and fast: Mariel growls out the lyrics and switches to her usual delivery. “Pride” follows the pattern of “Greed,” but this extreme, doomy metal piece is imbued with the prowess of progressive rock, with a loud, jazzy vocal and a wealth of instrumental nuances. The difference lies in the details, and Moths sounds disorienting in any case, and the extremity of “Wrath” is unique. Liquid prog parts mutate into fat riffs, growls alternate with jazzy and pop vocals, and all together it sounds bold, unusual, even provocative.
So, today, almost one year after Septem’s release, we managed to organize an interview with the band’s spokesman and bass-player Weslie Negrón.
Hi Weslie! How are you? What’s new in Moths’ nest?
Hello! Doing well, thank you for taking the time to do this! MOTHS’ camp is very busy right now. New drummer, new music, a few shows on the horizon, all great stuff!
New drummer? Who’s it? And what happened with Emmanuel De León? He recorded Septem with you, didn’t he?
Our current drummer is Emmanuel de León, our previous drummer used to be Daniel Figueroa who recorded Septem, yes. We had differences in how we viewed the future of the band and the overall activity behind it so we just parted ways. Emmanuel’s style, though, really rounds up the band in a more cohesive way and I can’t wait to show what we’ve done on the new tracks!
First of all, Moths is a relatively new band. How did it happen that the five of you gathered together, united by this music?
It’s been quite a journey to be honest. I started with the idea back in 2016. I used to be in a Death/Thrash metal band back then but I wasn’t really listening to that kind of music and I wanted to do something a bit more proggy, a bit more stoner and definitely Doom, so after a few tries, Jonathan and Omar joined the band on guitars. The drums on the first EP were recorded by William Machado, who’s a close friend of mine and an ex-bandmate from a previous band and he did us the favor of recording and did a marvelous job. Daniel Figueroa, who was the recording engineer of that EP, showed interest in joining the band and Damaris Rodriguez was asked to record vocals as a favor as well and ended up staying in the band as well.
Life happens, of course, so now we have a new lineup with Mariel Viruet on vocals from 2022 and Emmanuel de León on Drums from April this year. All amazing musicians who just happened to be part of the circle of friends we got here and we all just connect really well.
What were your initial influences both in doom and progressive fields? Did you aim from the start to this kind of sound?
I actually wanted to do something more Post-Rock oriented at the beginning but it didn’t work out with the people that I started working with. After Jonathan and Omar joined, we were thinking about doing something Mastodon-esque and it kinda started like that. I think Doom and Prog just came organically since its heavily in our DNA as musicians, we basically listen to everything in the Metal/Rock universe so it just flows. To be honest, we don’t really think about specific genres when we write, we just go with what we like and that has been the formula since the beginning.
But how spontaneous was this free-spreading uniqueness of Septem? How did you manage to fit all those different vibes in the album?
It was pretty spontaneous to be honest. We don’t really overthink what we want to do style-wise, we just try ideas that we think sound cool and they end up working out. I can only think about one instance where we knew we wanted to be as extreme as we could, which was for ‘Wrath’, and that’s why that one leans towards more of a Black Metal approach and, for sure, our most extreme song in our catalogue so far. We really just try what we think can sound cool and we make it work.
Septem was released on August 1st, 2025. Are you satisfied with people’s feedback since then?
Yes! It’s been great to see the overall reaction to it. It was a challenge of an album. We flew to Argentina to record it, and Damaris had left the band so we brought in Mariel, which was the first time that she joined an original band in her life, so that was a challenge within itself. It was also the first record she ever recorded. Putting all that in perspective, the feedback has been nothing short of great. Both from press and fans alike.
You recorded seven songs with a focus on the seven sins. How different was your approach regarding each song individually? Did you try to fit each of them to the lyrics or vice-versa?
When we started writing for the record we knew that we wanted to do a concept album and I pitched the idea of doing a record around the Seven Deadly Sins based on an article that I read many years ago by National Geographic that highlighted the different demons the Catholic church assigned to each sin, and that idea was floating ever since I read about it. When I pitched it to the band they said yes, so we wrote around that with the intention of trying to capture the overall essence of each sin. It was a fun challenge which I believe worked out and we’re very happy with how it turned out, both musically and lyric-wise.
What was the most difficult sin to transfer in music? And do you feel that you succeeded in general?
Honestly, I don’t think we had any difficulty in “transferring” the sin into music; it was a pretty smooth writing process. One thing to take into consideration is the fact that we kind of recorded the record with a bit of a deadline so we had to make some quick decisions in regards to the style of these tracks since we were in Argentina and we needed to make the most of our time there. There were some songs that were actually finished in the studio so we just made the decisions there. I think we succeeded; it was definitely our unique approach towards this concept and we’re very happy with the end result.
There’s a tight mix of different influences in Septem’s songs. How much of your own and your colleagues’ musical background is in this album?
We write everything together. We sit down, jam the songs and come up with the songs like that. So that incorporates everyone’s influences into the songs. I love to write music with this band. I often say I’m the least talented musician in the band because everyone around me are beasts on their instruments, so whatever we think of doing, we just present it and the idea comes out relatively easily. There’s also no ego, so we really think about what serves the song and we go with the option that sounds best for us.
No ego! Such a nice note! However, what’s Mariel Viruet’s experience? She doesn’t sound like a traditional metal vocalist.
Mariel is a trained singer. She has a BA in Music Performance as a Vocalist major. Within that there’s a lot of Latin Jazz training and, in her case, she loves Symphonic Metal so that’s also the approach she takes into her style. Her previous experience in a band before joining us was in a Nightwish tribute band which basically covers all the eras of the band, so you get all the different singing styles from that band also in her voice.
She didn’t know how to do the screams before joining the band. We even told her that she didn’t need to do the screams, that we could find a way to make it all clean vocals or maybe one of us would take over the screams, but she took it upon herself to learn them and she’s getting better and better. Like I said above, Septem was her first recording, so there’s natural improvement where she’s now from when she recorded the album.
Is she happy now singing things like you do in Moths? Doesn’t it conflict with her schedule with other bands or work?
I believe she’s happy with what she’s doing with us now. I want to think that she’s been able to discover herself and her capabilities in the band. She has such a strong voice and strong work ethic and we try to be as clear as possible in the fact that she doesn’t need to do stuff that she doesn’t want to, like originally we spoke about the screams, but she has been very open on trying new things out of her comfort zone and it has worked out. The scheduling of her regular life, along with the rest of the band’s, doesn’t really conflict as we try to make sure that we’re planning everything ahead respecting everyone’s time. There’s also a big commitment to the band from all members so we make sure to put in the necessary time for the band.
I was surprised when I found that you recorded Septem in Buenos Aires! What brought you there, so far away from home?
We recorded at Romaphonic Studios, one of the top recording studios in Argentina and probably all of South America. They had a program after the Pandemic where they reached out to a bunch of bands all across Latin America where they’d offer a deal to record at their studio at a price that it just made sense to go and try it, and we went and we had an amazing time. Funny enough, the staff thought that since we were from Puerto Rico we were going to record reggaeton haha. When they saw that we were a Metal band they got super excited and the team treated us amazingly. We recorded all instruments except for synths and ‘Sloth’ (the album’s intro) in 4 days. It was a super intense experience but we loved every second from it.
How easy is it to organize gigs in Puerto Rico? With what kind of bands do you share a stage usually?
It’s relatively easy to organize gigs here. The challenge, as it happens in many places in the world, especially after the pandemic, is that we don’t have too many venues, and since the Island is so small it mostly makes sense to make shows in San Juan, so sometimes you have three or four shows happening on the same night. The good thing though is that Puerto Rico has a great scene with great bands and a hungry audience. So most shows do really well. And we play with pretty much everyone. Within the last four shows we’ve played with Doom, Death Metal, Mathrock, even some hip/hop oriented bands, and we were the direct support of Avenged Sevenfold at the beginning of this year. We’re down to play with anyone and everyone.
How often do you play and how many opportunities do you have to play outside Puerto Rico?
We try to go outside of Puerto Rico at least once a year. Obviously, being at the level we are as a band the financial aspect of the band is still coming from our pockets, so sometimes we have to make the decision of staying to write some music or to actually go and tour. Last year we did a US and Mexico tour. In 2023 we did the US and in 2022 we played one show in Argentina while we were there recording Septem. Our first US tour was in 2019. We’d love to play outside of Puerto Rico more often. Visit Europe, some of the states we still haven’t gone to in the US, and more Latin American countries, as well as Asia and Oceania. Hopefully we can get busier on that front with the release of the new record.
How do you balance your live set now? Do you tend to plat more songs of Septem or do you mix it with both old and maybe new songs?
It depends on the show. Since we’re still promoting Septem, the set leans more towards that material, but if there’s a show where the lineup is a bit more mixed, we like to throw in some songs from Space Force and the MOTHS EP as well. Our latest shows though, the majority of the material has been around Septem.
You uploaded a digital release Live at Cart Music in 2025, but it includes only two songs from Septem. Why did you decide to publish this particular recording?
On our last US tour we decided that we wanted no off days. We got an offer from Cart Music, a studio in Philadelphia, US, to have a session recorded over there and we decided to do it before our show in Philly and it worked out. It was an awesome experience, they treated us greatly, and we’re happy with how it came out. We only had time to do two songs, but hopefully we can do more live recordings like that soon.
You already published a new single three months ago – Crown Jewel. Is it a herald of Moths’ new album or just a song you couldn’t keep unpublished for long?
“Crown Jewel” was a song commissioned to us by the Puerto Rican wrestler Gema, who was looking for a female-fronted band to make her new entrance song and we wrote it for that purpose. Another fun challenge; we had to keep all the quirks of wrestlers’ theme songs in mind when writing that and “Crown Jewel” came up. But no, this song is very different to everything we’ve done so far and definitely different to the new music we’re working on. I’m personally very excited about the new record. I think it sounds more cohesive, mature, and closer to the sound that I always envisioned for the band.
Yes, I noticed how the song differs from your previous stuff, so I was puzzled. Did you discuss the song’s structure or general direction with Gema? How did she find you in the end?!
Yep! Everything was done taking her opinion into consideration. She was pretty flexible and easy to work with all the way and really wanted us just to come up with our own idea and that’s how the final product came about.
She found us through social media as she made a post asking for Female-fronted Heavy bands from Puerto Rico that would be down to write a song for her. She reached out and we gladly accepted to do so.
Thanks for the interview Weslie! I’m glad that we managed to do it, so what’s up now? What are the plans of Moths for the rest of 2026?
Thank you! Really means a lot to have people interested in our material and our story. Right now we’re working on new music, we’re hoping to have a new single out before the year ends. We got a few shows coming up as well and we’re working on the next record too. Busy always! Hoping everyone enjoys the new material as well once it is out there.
https://mothspr.bandcamp.com/album/septem
https://www.facebook.com/MOTHSPR/