Erk Aicrag interview: ‘Curiosity interests me much more than purity’

For more than three decades, Erk Aicrag has been immediately recognizable as the voice and physical force of Hocico, but his creative life has long since expanded beyond a single project or medium. Alongside Rabia Sorda, he writes books and poetry, performs spoken word, creates soundtracks, works with Eric13 in Chuntata Boys, developed the dance-theatre piece “The Sound of Bodies Breaking” with Giulia Mandelli, and is now building MANIC with Patrick Heaney. Rather than treating these projects as separate identities, Aicrag increasingly sees them as different places in which the same creative impulse can take form.

In this conversation with Side-Line, he speaks about recognising when aggression becomes formula, why reading poetry to 40 silent people can feel more exposing than performing for thousands, how leaving Mexico changed his understanding of his own cultural identity, and why uncertainty has become more valuable with age. He also discusses Rabia Sorda, “Unseen Horror Scenes,” Chuntata Boys, MANIC and a creative philosophy increasingly driven by curiosity rather than the need to defend a fixed idea of who he is.

Erk Aicrag interview

Karo: You currently work through Hocico, Rabia Sorda, your books and spoken word, your own soundtracks, and Chuntata Boys. When an idea appears, do you already know which language it belongs to, or does the form itself reveal what the idea really is?

Erk Aicrag: These days I normally let the idea tell me where it wants to go.

I don’t sit down and say, “Okay, today I have to write something for Hocico, Rabia Sorda, Chuntata Boys…” or “this should become a poem.” Sometimes it starts with one sentence, sometimes with a sound, sometimes just with a feeling that bothers me and I don’t even understand yet why.

I get these little Eureka moments all the time, so I write almost every day. Over the years I’ve built this strange personal database of phrases, fragments, images and ideas. Some of them sit there for years doing absolutely nothing. Then suddenly I’m working on a song, a poem or something else and one of those old fragments speaks to me again. It has found its place.

Having different projects gives me a lot of freedom in that sense. I don’t have to force every part of myself into one. Some things need electronics and screaming. Some need guitars and drums. Some become stronger when there is almost nothing around them except my voice and the words. Sometimes even the voice is too much and it really is only the words.

And now I have MANIC, a new project with my friend Patrick Heaney. That has opened another door. We’re working toward our first single, “Into The Static,” and it already has its own personality. I really enjoy that feeling of entering a new room without completely knowing what is inside yet.

Maybe that’s what I appreciate most at this point as a creator: I have different places where ideas can live. I don’t expect one project to carry everything that is inside me.

Karo: “Unseen Horror Scenes” looks at paranoia, addiction and forms of social decay connected to contemporary digital life. Early Hocico drew much of its aggression from very tangible surroundings and lived experience. Has your anger become less geographical over the years and more concerned with systems and human behaviour itself?

Erk Aicrag: Definitely. When Hocico started, a lot of the anger came directly from what was around us. Mexico City was everywhere in the music: violence, inequality, pollution, corruption, chaos, that constant pressure around you. And of course we were very young, so you absorb all of that in a very direct way. There wasn’t much distance between what was happening outside and what came out of us.

Now I’ve lived in Germany for more than twenty years and travelled through many places of the world, and you start noticing that many things you thought belonged to one particular place are actually everywhere. The scenery changes, but people are still dealing with fear, loneliness, addiction, manipulation, frustration, the need to belong.

Digital life has made that even more visible to me. And I’m not anti-technology at all, quite the opposite, I love technology. What fascinates and worries me is what we do with it and what it does back to us. We have never been so connected technically, yet there is an incredible amount of isolation. We voluntarily carry devices that demand our attention every few seconds and then wonder why we cannot concentrate, why we compare ourselves constantly or why we feel anxious.

So yes, the anger became less geographical. I’m probably more interested now in systems, but also in human behaviour itself: what is being done to us, but also what we willingly do to ourselves.

The horror isn’t always somewhere outside anymore. Quite often we’re carrying it around in our pockets.

Karo: After more than thirty years, aggression is no longer simply an instinct in Hocico; it is also something you know how to construct extremely well. How do you recognise the difference between anger that is still artistically necessary and aggression that has merely become part of a familiar vocabulary?

Erk Aicrag: That is something I think about quite a lot, because aggression can very easily become a costume or even a brand in a band like Hocico.

After more than thirty years, of course we know how to do certain things. Racso knows how to build tension in a track, I know what I can do with my voice, and we both know what people will immediately recognise as Hocico.

And exactly because you know those tools so well, you have to be careful. Craft can very easily become formula.

If I scream simply because “Hocico screams,” I’m not really interested. I’ve done that already. There has to be something underneath it that I genuinely feel.

What has changed for me is that I don’t automatically associate intensity with volume anymore. When I was younger, if I was angry, I wanted to destroy everything with it. Now I know that sometimes one carefully chosen sentence can be much more violent than somebody screaming in your face.

Of course I still love the aggressive side of Hocico and Rabia Sorda. Otherwise I wouldn’t still be doing this. It is part of the DNA of those projects and probably part of mine too.

But aggression needs a reason. Otherwise it becomes decoration.

Karo: Rabia Sorda gives you guitars, drums, Punk and a much more visibly physical band dynamic, while Hocico remains rooted in electronic construction with Racso. Do those projects allow you to express different sides of the same personality, or have they gradually produced genuinely different versions of you as a performer?

Erk Aicrag: A little bit of both. They definitely started as different sides of the same person, but after so many years I think each project has also taught me a different way of being on stage.

Hocico has something almost ritualistic for me now. The moment certain sounds begin, my body knows that world immediately. There is a tension and a darkness there that has been developing for more than thirty years. I don’t really have to think about becoming that person anymore. It just happens.

Rabia Sorda feels completely different physically. Having Marco behind me on drums, Titus with the guitar and sometimes Giulia on percussion changes the way I move and react. A drummer hitting behind you pushes your body differently from a programmed beat coming through the monitors. There is more punk energy, more dirt, more of that feeling that something could go slightly (or very) wrong. I love that.

And now with MANIC I’m discovering another version again. The interesting thing is that Patrick and I don’t have thirty years of history telling us what this project is supposed to be. We are still finding out. I had almost forgotten how exciting that uncertainty can be.

But I don’t see any of them as characters I put on. They’re all me.

Maybe it is the same nervous system using different muscles.

Karo: “No Hay Dolor!” brought Rabia Sorda back with new recorded material after a relatively long interval. At this point, what does Rabia Sorda give you creatively that Hocico still cannot: not stylistically, but psychologically?

Erk Aicrag: Freedom from history, in a way. Hocico is something I’m extremely proud of. It changed my life completely. But when something has existed for more than thirty years, there is inevitably history attached to everything new you do.

There are expectations from the audience, of course, but there are also expectations inside yourself. You’re always having a conversation with everything you did before, whether you want to or not.

Rabia Sorda has always felt lighter to me psychologically. It still connects very directly with that childish dream I had of being in a rock’n’roll band. A loud band in a room, drums behind you, guitars, sweat, mistakes, energy.

I can be more impulsive there. More punk. More rock’n’roll. Sometimes even a little stupid in the best possible way. I don’t have to analyse everything. If something feels exciting, sometimes that’s enough.

I think that becomes very valuable when you’ve been making music for such a long time. You need places where instinct can still beat experience occasionally.

I want to keep surprising myself. Hopefully other people too.

Karo: I saw you at NCN on the Lesebühne with “Words Like Razors,” where there was nowhere for language to hide behind volume, distortion or a large production. Has reading your work aloud changed the way you write lyrics, because you now hear immediately whether words can stand without music supporting them?

Erk Aicrag: Absolutely. And honestly, standing on a small stage with only a microphone can be more frightening for me than standing in front of thousands of people with Hocico or Rabia Sorda. At the reading at NCN I am sure you felt that.

With those projects there is volume, lights, distortion, adrenaline, movement. There are so many things happening at the same time. On a reading stage, if the sentence is bad, there it is. Naked. Everybody can hear it, and most importantly, I can hear it.

That has definitely changed the way I look at words.

I don’t think every lyric has to work as poetry without music. A song has its own language. Rhythm, repetition, pronunciation, even the physical sound of a word can be part of what makes a lyric work.

But reading aloud has made me much more sensitive to bullshit in my own writing.

Sometimes I write something and it looks fantastic on the page or on the screen. Then I say it aloud and think, “Come on, man, what the fuck is this?” You suddenly hear somebody trying very hard to sound profound.

Delete. That’s a very useful filter.

Karo: “Pingo” deliberately combines poetry, narrative, visual material and your soundtrack “The Noise Is Unavoidable.” When the same emotional world can exist as text, image and sound, do you still think in terms of separate works, or are you increasingly interested in building one larger artistic environment through different media?

Erk Aicrag: I’m definitely becoming more interested in the larger environment.

With Pingo I really felt that happening. The writing created images in my head. Then the images suggested sounds. Sometimes the soundtrack changed the way I understood something I had written months before.

None of those things were simply illustrating the others. They started having a conversation with each other.

That opened something for me.

When I was younger, I thought much more in categories: this is an album, this is a book, this is a concert. Today those borders are much less important to me.

If an idea wants to become text, music, movement, photography (or all of those things) why should I stop it because somebody needs to know which shelf to put it on?

We recently pushed that idea further with “The Sound of Bodies Breaking,” the dance-theatre work I developed with Giulia Mandelli. It became a very intense project for us, something we poured a lot of energy into over a long period of time. There you have bodies, spoken language, sound, atmosphere and movement all influencing each other. I find that incredibly exciting, because suddenly music is not only something you hear; it changes the way you perceive a body moving through a space. We definitely want to take the piece to other stages in the future and continue developing it.

I still love making songs. I will probably always love making songs.

But I also like the idea that a work doesn’t necessarily have to end when the song ends or when you reach the last page. If the idea still has somewhere else to go, I want to follow it.

Karo: Writing prose or poetry also allows ambiguity to remain unresolved in a way that the physical directness of Hocico often does not. Has becoming more serious about literature given you permission to leave certain questions unanswered instead of converting them immediately into confrontation?

Erk Aicrag: Totally. And I think age has a lot to do with that too.

When you are young, certainty feels incredibly powerful. Something is wrong, somebody is the enemy, you know exactly where you stand and you want to scream it. There is something beautiful about that energy and I don’t regret it.

But then you live longer and things become more complicated.

People you love die. People you trust disappoint you. Somebody you dislike can suddenly surprise you in a positive way. You realize you’ve contradicted yourself a thousand times. You make decisions you once swore you would never make. And eventually you also understand that the person telling the story isn’t always completely reliable, including yourself.

Literature gives me a place where I don’t have to solve all of that.

I can put two contradictory feelings beside each other and allow both of them to be true. I can write about something without immediately deciding who was right and who was wrong. Sometimes I can simply say, “I don’t understand what happened here.”

Years ago that uncertainty probably would have frustrated me. Now I find it fascinating.

I still love confrontation. That hasn’t disappeared. But I don’t believe anymore that every sentence needs to end with an exclamation mark.

On the page I don’t have to win the argument. That feels like freedom.

Karo: With Eric13 and Chuntata Boys you deliberately use the term “Lizard Music” for something that refuses a conventional genre passport. After spending most of your career inside scenes with very strong identities and codes, how liberating, or perhaps how difficult, is it to make something whose first task is not to belong anywhere?

Erk Aicrag: It is incredibly liberating. And I say that with enormous affection for the scene I come from. The industrial and gothic scene gave us a home at a time when we really needed one. Hocico became part of that culture in a way Racso and I could never have imagined when we were making tapes in Mexico City. Later Rabia Sorda followed its own path through that world too.

I will always be grateful for that.

But every scene develops rules, even scenes created by people who hate rules. That’s one of the funny things about subcultures: eventually even rebellion develops a dress code.

After some years you know which sounds belong, how people are supposed to look, what is considered authentic and even what kind of rebellion is acceptable.

So “Lizard Music” with Chuntata Boys is partly Eric13 and me having fun with all of that. It is our way of saying: don’t ask us what box this belongs in because we don’t know and, honestly, we don’t care.

If tomorrow we want electronics, guitars, mariachi, noise, something ridiculous or something that really shouldn’t work together, that’s probably exactly why we should try it.

At this point curiosity interests me much more than purity.

Karo: You left Mexico City for Germany in 2005 and have now spent more than two decades living there. I wonder whether distance changes artistic belonging in unexpected ways: has living abroad made you more conscious of what in your work is genuinely Mexican, and what you once assumed was cultural but was actually simply personal?

Erk Aicrag: Absolutely. When you live inside your own culture, you don’t recognise half of it because it is simply normal to you.

I think I understood how Mexican I am much more clearly after leaving Mexico. Funny enough, I even started embracing Mexican music much more while living in Germany. Things I hadn’t necessarily paid much attention to when I was surrounded by them suddenly spoke to me differently from a distance.

And it goes much deeper than music or the obvious cultural symbols.

The relationship with death. The way tragedy and humour can exist in the same sentence. Family. Religion, even if you’re not religious like me. Violence. Superstition. The ability to laugh in the middle of a terrible situation. That strange combination of beauty and brutality that can feel completely natural when you grow up with it.

At the same time, Germany changed me enormously. I’ve spent a huge part of my adult life there. My family is there. My routines are there. Some of the way I think now is German too, whether I notice it or not.

So I don’t feel any need to decide, “Am I Mexican or am I German?”

I’m very Mexican. I’ve also been profoundly shaped by Germany. And there is some strange third country inside me that exists only because I’ve lived between the two.

Sometimes you have to leave the picture before you can really see its colours.

Karo: You move between extremely exposed forms of expression: screaming in front of thousands of people, reading something personal in a small room, writing alone, producing sound in private. Which of those situations now makes you feel most vulnerable, and has that changed as you have become more experienced?

Erk Aicrag: The small room, for sure. Put me in front of ten thousand people and there is actually a strange kind of protection in it. A huge crowd can almost become one organism. There is noise, adrenaline, darkness, lights and more than thirty years of physical memory telling me what to do. Things can still go wrong, of course, but I know that territory extremely well.

Now put me two metres away from forty people sitting quietly while I read something personal that I wrote alone at three in the morning…

That’s different.

Those are forty individual faces looking back at you and silence is brutal.

Writing alone is vulnerable too, but nobody sees all the terrible versions before something becomes good. Nobody watches you deleting the paragraph you thought was genius the night before.

When you read something aloud, there is nowhere to hide.

The funny thing is that experience has made me much more confident as a performer, but it has also made me deliberately interested in situations where I’m not completely confident.

And I don’t want to spend the rest of my creative life only doing things I already know I can do.

Feeling vulnerable means there is still something at stake and I need that.

Karo: Looking at everything you are doing now, I get the impression that “Erk Aicrag” has become broader than the role of frontman, even though Hocico remains central. When you look ahead, are you interested in expanding that artistic territory even further, or is the next challenge to make these different strands speak to one another more deeply?

Erk Aicrag: Both, probably. But more and more I’m interested in understanding how all these things belong together.

For most of my life as an artist, people understandably knew me first as the singer of Hocico. And I’m incredibly grateful for that. Hocico changed my life.

Because of this band I travelled around the world, met people I would never have met otherwise, stood on stages I never imagined I would stand on and built a large part of my life around creativity. And after more than thirty years, I can finally look back with enough distance to understand that this music actually meant something to people.

Believe me, that is a strange and beautiful thing to realize.

When you’re inside the storm, inside of your music career, you’re always thinking about the next album, the next tour, the next problem, the next train or flight. You don’t really stop and think, “Wow, this thing we made somehow became part of somebody else’s life.”

I appreciate that much more now. I don’t take it for granted.

But I also understand that being the frontman of Hocico is one part of who I am and not the complete definition.

I love writing. I love making soundtracks. I love spoken word. I love Rabia Sorda. I love doing something completely strange with Chuntata Boys. I loved developing “The Sound of Bodies Breaking.” And now MANIC with Patrick gives me that beautiful feeling of starting again. Our first single, “Into The Static,” is coming soon, and I’m excited about building something without already knowing what the finished world is supposed to look like.

I don’t see any of those things as distractions from each other anymore. They’re different outlets for the same person.

And maybe that is one of the interesting things about getting older creatively. When you’re young, you’re desperately trying to define who you are. Then you spend years protecting or defending that identity. Eventually, if you’re lucky like me, you realize you don’t have to defend it anymore. You can just keep moving.

I don’t feel the need to prove that I can do many different things. I’m much more interested in finding the connections between them and following those connections wherever they take me.

After all these years, curiosity is still probably the most important thing I have. If I ever lose that, then I should probably stop.

About Erk Aicrag

Erk Aicrag is a Mexico City-born vocalist, songwriter, producer and writer best known as the frontman of Hocico and founder of Rabia Sorda. He began making music with his cousin Racso Agroyam in 1993, when Hocico took its definitive form; the duo released its first album, “Odio Bajo el Alma,” in 1997. Aicrag later created Rabia Sorda in 2003 as a separate outlet for material that could move beyond Hocico’s established framework. He relocated to Germany in 2005 and has lived there since.

His work has increasingly extended beyond conventional album formats. Aicrag has presented his writing publicly through “Until My Throat Bleeds / Words Like Razors,” a collection incorporating poetry, short prose, reflections and previously unpublished lyrics. In January 2026 he followed it with the illustrated book “Pingo / The Damage Is Unavoidable,” combining poetry, narrative and visual material; its accompanying 20-track soundtrack, “The Noise Is Unavoidable,” was composed and produced by Aicrag and released in late 2025.

Across these projects, his work now encompasses electronic music, punk- and rock-oriented performance, poetry, spoken word and soundtrack composition, alongside the continuing activity of Hocico and Rabia Sorda. Side-Line previously covered Hocico’s 2026 album “Unseen Horror Scenes.”