A new Mariachi El Bronx album can’t have been on many bingo cards for 2026, right? The sincere mariachi alter-egos of The Bronx have taken over a decade away from the spotlight, and the announcement that we would be treated to ‘Mariachi El Bronx (IV)’ came as a welcome surprise. It seems fitting that one of the least expected, and most joyful musical collusions would burst out of dormancy in the same way they exploded in 2009.

“It’s obviously been a long time coming but it feels like the perfect time,” explains frontman Matt Caughthran. “In our world, we had a lot going on with The Bronx; 2023 was twenty years of The Bronx so we wanted to make sure that we hit that milestone and that we had time to celebrate that. It felt like the time where we could kinda close the book a little bit, put The Bronx on the shelf and switch over to El Bronx. We’re excited about the new album, we’re excited about the year ahead and getting these new tunes out in front of everybody.”

The last time we had a dedicated Mariachi El Bronx record, Pharell Williams’ ‘Happy’ was the top of the charts and the Ice Bucket challenge was the viral moment of the summer. Have the changes in the real world trickled their way through to the technicolour reality inhabited by Mariachi El Bronx in their time away from the spotlight? “Our thing is still about creating music and putting something positive out into the world. It’s been a while since we made a record and there was definitely a moment where we were writing demos and we had our fingers crossed. Before I laid down the first vocal track here in my home studio, I was like ‘man, I sure hope this still feels good and sounds good’, but it did and it does.”

“With the benefit of having the members of The Bronx inside Mariachi El Bronx and the extra members of Mariachi El Bronx very much being part of our family… we’ve been in communication the whole time and we’re all friends. It’s not like we haven’t spoken in ten years, you know? We’ve all been playing music together so, in that way, the inner circle hasn’t changed, the vibe hasn’t changed, our mentality hasn’t changed. As they say in the in the sports world,  ‘you gotta control the controllables’, right? You got to control what you can control, don’t worry about anything else.” 

While Caughthran is right – the core of the Mariachi El Bronx experience remains the same – the trio of singles released since his album announcement betray a slightly darker emotion. Take ‘Forgive and Forget’, the opening track and first single, for instance. “That was one of the first songs that we wrote. Musically, the song is just beautiful. It’s got some guts to it; it’s got some strength to it, so I wanted to make sure that the lyrics and that visual aspect to the lyrics match the song. I had those verses written really quickly. When I sat down to do that, I had this idea of this almost psychedelic, drug-induced flashback of this person who was looking back on their life as if the worst moments of their life were the best moments. It’s like you’re looking back at all the mistakes you made with rose-coloured glasses because there might not be any other option.”

Caughthran switches into the rhythm of his song, almost pivoting from his speaking voice to his passionate stage tones “I had these verses of, ‘strike a nerve till you find a vein’ and ‘let me drink, let me drown’ and and all these heavy but very visual and artistic glimpses into someone who is very much spiralling. Then the chorus juxtaposes it, and that’s where like the rose-coloured glasses come in. It’s looking back on your life with fondness even though what you’re looking back on might have been like the worst thing that you’ve ever done or the worst thing that’s ever happened to you. It’s a very chaotic song and a very distorted song.

“Sometimes, when I’m writing songs, I can look back on my life and I like to just take a lot of different twists and turns on things, to reinvent ideas or take a memory and turn it into a story or take a feeling and turn it into a person. It’s just a really cool thing to do in the songwriting process and with El Bronx and the tradition of storytelling in mariachi music, it’s such an invitation to be creative and to stretch yourself as a writer. That’s what I was trying to do in that song; that’s what I was honestly trying to do with the whole record. I’m really lucky because the music is so beautiful so I get to sit down and just sit with these incredible songs and and try to come up with some lyrics that do them justice.”

The image of the chaotic hopeless romantic that we encountered in 2011’s ’48 Roses’, the tale of a guy with “four different lovers and forty eight roses,” reappears in ‘RIP Romeo’, though Caughthran swears it’s a coincidence. “It’s really funny because both those songs were written by Ray and myself. Our violin player, Ray Suen –  incredible musician  – he wrote the music for ’48 Roses’ and I wrote all the lyrics and we came up with that song together. Then, on this album, Ray was really really busy doing the soundtrack [for thriller ‘The Thicket’] at the time, and our band now… We’re spread out, you know, so you just gotta schedule things a little bit more. I wanted to go see Ray up in LA and I hadn’t seen him in quite a while, and honestly, we had written the structure of the song in an hour. I came home back to my home studio, and I spent the next day just writing the verses then we had the song!”

“I think in the spirit of ’48 Roses’, ‘R.I .P. Romeo’ is very much the same and I think that Ray and I like writing that type of song. Lyrically speaking, there’s a zillion songs about Romeo. I have always wanted to be part of that lineage but with a topic like that, rather I feel like you really have to wait for the song to come to you. If you’re like forcing yourself to write a song about Romeo or Romeo and Juliet, I feel like it’s not gonna be any better than something anyone else has done and God knows, we don’t need another song that’s uninspired or or just like fodder for the fucking Shakespeare campfire, so I thought this song came to me in a way that was organic and and inspired and clear.”

Storytelling and creating narratives is always at the back of Caughthran’s mind, especially with a song like ‘Bandaleros’. “It’s very much a corrido,” he explains, referring to the traditional Mexican narrative ballads. “The corridos are about heroes, villains, legends… stories that have been passed down generation to generation, but they’re also musical newspapers for communities and cultures. They tell the stories of significant battles or things that are going on in the community in the present day. I was thinking about a brotherhood and the band as a brotherhood, kind of going into battle together and just that type of energy, you know, that kind heroic energy where you go into battle and you let the chips fall where they may. 

“Nine times out of ten, it’s the melody comes first, or the music comes first, and I’ll build off that. But there are songs that’ll have completely written out. A song like that, later on the album, is ‘Tie You Down’. That song is a song that, that I had written and already kind of arranged lyrically and all that stuff. I’m trying to think if there’s another one on the record, I try not to go into it too heavy with finished lyrics just because: one, I love the process of going from start to finish with the song and two, I had so many different things written before the album. I would just kind of hold on to themes or lines that I really liked. But, you know, when you write a record, you have to leave yourself open to like the initial feeling and the moment of inspiration that the song gives you when you first hear it.”

“There’s a song on the album called ‘The Takers’ and that song, when I heard it the first time, I instantly just started thinking about this post-apocalyptic world and there were these four cowboys that survived. They’re sitting around like the last campfire, telling stories about how the world ended from their section of the world, ‘from the north, from the south, from the east to the west.’ Then I kind of started to think about the west and it became this idea of how the rest of the United States looks at the west. Songs have such a crazy journey from start to finish, it’s really cool. I like to build the narrative.

“Usually, I’m a big melody guy. So I usually build the narrative around the melody. It’s hard for me to just, to stay super strict to a lyrical thing. If the melody is not right, or if it kind of feels like you’re jamming a square peg into a round hole, you know what I mean? Like, the melody is the most important thing for me. I want people to be able to sing it, to be able to feel it. And then I feel pretty comfortable with my own skill set to be able to find the right lyrics to match the melody, you know? So, that’s part of the puzzle that I get to figure out as a lyricist and as a writer and as a singer. 

“I have ADD pretty bad when I’m writing and just in life in general. And, as I get older, it’s like, it just becomes insane. But because of that, I think there’s a really unique thing that happens in my songwriting, which is where I jump from ideas and feelings and stories. I go back and forth in songs, and you can have a song that starts one way and that one line is about one thing, and then another line is completely about a whole another thing, and then the next. The chorus is a whole another thing. They all come from the same session, but they’re from different thoughts and different ideas. Then it becomes about bringing them together, and then it’s this beautiful thing where it’s like a poem and it makes sense and it’s beautiful. But you don’t get the meaning when you’re writing it, you’re not sitting down and saying, ‘I’m going to write a song about this’, because if I try to do that… My brain, it literally won’t let me about halfway through. I’ll veer and go somewhere else. So a lot of times, I end up finishing a song, and then I look at it as a body of work, and I say, ‘whoa, that’s what this means’. 

“There’s a lot of times in music when you want to try to make things as straightforward and easily digestible, and just something that people can sink their teeth into. You never want to get too personal or too specific because I feel like that alienates people. But sometimes you can go into details and still end up with a song that is broad and that people can understand and appreciate and fall in love with.”

But what about The Bronx, his main project? Caughthran’s still carrying the spirit of his original sound with him. “Punk rock is something that means a lot to me. I love the sound, I love the aggression, I love the energy. I think that, as we all know, punk rock is more than just a sound. It’s an idea. It’s a standard that you choose to live by by doing something different and trying your best to put something into the world that is in the face of the status quo and in the betterment of society. So, you know, I’m very proud of The Bronx and El Bronx and everything that we’ve accomplished. I would just encourage anyone out there to do your best to try to put something positive out into the world, try to put something creative out into the world, whether it’s starting a band or doing something else. The world needs more of that punk rock energy out there.”

We’ll be receiving the Mariachi El Bronx energy at least this year, as the frontman revealed their plans to tour in 2026. “We’re working on getting over to the UK, we’re working on getting over to Europe, hopefully in the fall this year. But, you know, we’re going to get there. It’s a crazy world out there for touring, especially for a Mariachi band with eight people. It’s not the easiest thing to do, but we’re definitely going to make it happen. The Bronx and El Bronx, we’re touring bands, we’re musicians who love to play live. We’re currently, rehearsing the entire album and playing it live in Tijuana on February 14th, If people want to, they’ll be able to watch that when we stream it live on Veeps. That’ll be something cool in the meantime that you can watch before we actually get the band outside of California and start traveling across the world.”

For a band that surprises at every turn, both with their sincerity and their love of world building within their vibrantly original sound, there’s no doubt that they’ll make a European tour happen while we’re still reeling from ‘Mariachi El Bronx IV’.

KATE ALLVEY

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‘Mariachi El Bronx IV’ will be released on ATO Records on 13th February 2026