Testing out new festival grounds at the Palmer Events Center, Levitation’s three-day rock lineup presents headliners Pavement, TV on the Radio, and Mastodon, plus plenty of subgenre-spanning acts. Shuffling over from Halloween weekend to the other side of ACL, the Austin Psych Fest companion, booked by Resound, takes place Sept. 26-28 across an indoor and outdoor stage, plus a smattering of individually ticketed late-night shows across town.
“It’s a lot of scenes, a lot of composition, actually,” singer/saxophonist Jonás Derbéz says of Diles que no me maten’s upcoming, yet untitled, album. For a band who made their name in Mexico City and beyond as an improvisation-driven krautrock-psychedelia project, it’s a surprising revelation.
“We have one song that is more improvised, the way we used to do songs earlier,” Derbéz says reassuringly. “But this [album] was the one [where] we decided: Let’s make all these complicated ideas that we [have] always wanted to do, put [them] on the table, and try to match them all together.”
It was a refreshing experiment for the fivepiece, who have stretched metal-inspired basslines and sultry guitar riffs behind Derbéz’s spoken word lyricism for half a decade now. Their three released albums take up dark tonal stakes, echoing with shoegaze distortion, as Derbéz whisper-shouts in your ear with intimate presence and political urgency.
The group’s name, which translates to “Tell them not to kill me,” is drawn from the title of a short story by the renowned father of Latin American magical realism, Juan Rulfo. While writing their upcoming work, Derbéz was reading Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden.
“I’m trying to consolidate more meaning into less information, to write [as little as] possible and still get the right image for what I’m trying to say,” he says. “I went more abstract with the images, which is more natural to me: to be more hidden.”
For a deeply lyric-focused band, international performances have expanded the way they hear their own music. Touring the U.S. and becoming familiar with Mexican American culture, Derbéz and his bandmates noted differences in how audiences reacted. The genre-bending group’s exploration of sounds and compositional directions are partially inspired by that experience.
“Here in Mexico, people are more playful and more cheerful and more loud,” the artist says. “And in the U.S. they are listening more to the music. So as we start[ed] touring the U.S., we started to develop new sounds [that] we already had at rehearsal, but never [played] live – to go really, really deep and really low.”
While their fourth album will sit in this sparsely embellished, bass-heavy atmosphere, “Tan Grande Nada,” a recent surf-soaked single the group recorded for Brooklyn label Mexican Summer’s compilation Sitting on the Moon, has inspired a more country-animated, saxophone-riddled backdrop for a fifth album already in the works.
In Austin, as with many cities across the country, the band has a smattering of friends and looks forward to playing for the Mexican American community. He’s not sure about his bandmates, but Derbéz is stoked to see Pavement.
“We’re happy to go play Levitation,” he says. “It’s been a longtime dream for us.”
Levitation takes over the Palmer Events Center September 26-28.
This article appears in September 26 • 2025.
