Los fuegos artificiales de Móstoles and other neighbourhood nights

This lyric is a photo album without photos. Los fuegos artificiales de Móstoles (The Móstoles Fireworks) doesn't tell a story with a beginning and an end: it lists. Places, nicknames, scares, parties, secrets. It reels it all off in one go, like when you bump into someone from your old gang, you start with the do-you-remembers and there's no stopping you.

I'm fascinated by how that device works. The little hills, the hangout, gym class, one girl's house, another's chalet. Proper names that mean nothing specific to an outside listener, but that sound like any neighbourhood on the city's outskirts. Everyone had their old wood you weren't supposed to go near, their neighbour with a reputation, their local festival.

Looking at the sky

The title comes from one of those scenes: getting drunk watching the Móstoles fireworks. It strikes me as a perfect image of adolescence, half epic and half tacky. Looking at a sky full of colours with your head spinning and the feeling that the night will never end.

The lyrics don't hold back the spicy or the murky either. There are nights in the storage room, photocopied notes at the end of the month, a visit to the police station three at a time, a sauna, a threesome. It tells it with the same ease with which it lists the places, without asking permission or giving explanations, which is how you remember the things that really marked you.

And then there's the chorus, which is an absurd gem: the drunks in the park who were flow. It repeats, it stretches, it ends up as just the word flow. It means nothing and it means everything. It's that inside joke only your gang understands and that years later still makes you laugh.

I'd dedicate it to my people from back then, to whoever was at any of those nights. But also to anyone who has their own Móstoles in their memory, their own list of places that no longer exist or aren't what they used to be.

Put it on on a nostalgic day, with old photos on the table. And if your own list comes to you, write it down before you forget it.

The full lyrics are below. Listen on Spotify