Metalachi, a Southern California cover band that fuses the power of metal music with the culturally rich instruments of mariachi, will perform on Sunday in San Antonio.
The show is at 7 p.m. Oct. 5 at Paper Tiger, 2410 N. St. Mary’s St.
Admission is $6.46 for early bird tickets and $23.51 for general admission – advance.
Kyla Vera, Metalachi’s violinist, said the band plays at least once a year at Paper Tiger.
“Every time we play at Paper Tiger, we have a great audience,” Vera said in a Zoom interview Sept. 22 from her home in Lancaster, California. “We usually sell out or get close to it.”
Vera said Metalachi has released three albums available to stream on Spotify and revealed that the band was headed to San Diego the same night of the interview to record three more covers: “I Want You to Want Me” by Cheap Trick, “Rebel Yell” by Billy Idol and, as Vera says, the most popular, “Creep” by Radiohead.
Born and raised in Spring near Houston, Vera has played the violin since she was 6 years old.
Vera joined Metalachi 10 years ago. She said she was already a fan of the band when she saw they were looking for a violinist and, encouraged by her friends, she decided to audition. Before moving to the Los Angeles area, Vera was already working on a solo metal album that was mariachi inspired.
Vera has also been managing Metalachi for the past five years and handles the tours and shows including scheduling, hotel stays, merch designs and finances.
The other band members — lead singer Victor Wichmann, Paco Halen on guitar, Pancho Rockafeller on guitarrón and Pollo Loco on trumpet — live in Los Angeles and Riverside counties.
Vera said she believes Metalachi was founded about 15 years ago. The band created its current Facebook page in 2009.
“Most of them played mariachi music already, but mariachi isn’t necessarily accessible to a really large demographic — like, you have people that will appreciate it, but it’s definitely not everyone’s cup of tea,” Vera said. “And so I think the idea was just to bring the two cultures together and just really have something that a lot of people in a general group could enjoy.”
This year Metalachi will perform a total of 77 shows in many of their regular spots in states such as Washington, Arizona and New Mexico.
For more information, visit https://papertigersatx.com/ or https://www.metalachirocks.com/.
