There is a moment early in my conversation with Falsimonian guitarist, keyboardist, composer and producer Jesus Fuentes Valverde where a lot of what sits behind the band suddenly starts making sense. Before the jazz degrees, before melodic death metal collided with Latin rhythms and before the dystopian world of debut EP For Survival, there was a 17-year-old musician standing onstage playing progressive metal and feeling the energy coming back from the crowd.
Jesus remembers playing material from bands like Dream Theater and Opeth when that feeling really hit him. He cannot recall the exact show, but he remembers looking out from the stage, feeling the connection between the musicians and the people in front of them and realising that this was something he could imagine doing forever. Music had moved beyond being something he simply enjoyed and started looking like a future.
That future would take Jesus much further musically than he probably imagined at 17. Classical piano entered the picture, jazz became an enormous part of his life, and formal study eventually led to both a master’s and doctorate in jazz performance. Somewhere underneath all of that, though, the metal never really went away.
Now those worlds collide inside Falsimonian, the US/Mexico-based melodic death metal band preparing to release their five-track debut EP, For Survival, independently on November 7.
FROM IRON MAIDEN TO MELODIC DEATH METAL
Jesus can place at least some of the blame for his heavier musical tendencies on his cousin and eventual Falsimonian vocalist Erick Valverde. One of the important early gateways was Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son, particularly hearing the keyboards and synths surrounding tracks like “Moonchild” and realising that those sounds could exist naturally inside heavy music.
Erick was already considerably deeper into the heavier end of metal and began introducing his cousin to bands including Dark Tranquillity, Dark Lunacy and increasingly aggressive forms of melodic death and death metal. Jesus laughs that Erick is the person he has to “blame” for pulling him further down that particular rabbit hole, but that shared musical connection would eventually become one of the foundations of Falsimonian.
The interesting part is that Jesus never stayed inside one musical world for very long. Metal was always there, but classical music and jazz would fundamentally change the way he heard harmony, rhythm and composition before he eventually returned to extreme music with a very different musical vocabulary behind him.
CLASSICAL PIANO, JAZZ AND FOLLOWING THE MUSIC
When Jesus decided he wanted to study music, he almost expected some resistance from his family. Instead, his mother looked at the amount of time he was already spending at the keyboard and supported him pursuing it seriously.
Jesus entered a Bachelor of Music program in commercial music and was required to study classical piano. He had little idea what to expect and had never really gone through formal classical piano training before, but rather than becoming an obstacle, it opened another door and he fell in love with it.
Jazz followed as part of what became a surprisingly natural progression. Jesus describes moving from classical study into jazz as something organic rather than a dramatic left turn, and he kept following that road through a master’s degree in jazz performance and eventually a doctorate.
After spending years studying and performing at that level, however, he found himself wanting to reconnect with the music that had been there much earlier in his life. He still loved jazz, but Falsimonian offered an opportunity to take everything he had absorbed through those years of study and throw it back into something heavier.
BEFORE FALSIMONIAN, THERE WAS LIMINALITY
The creative relationship between Jesus and Erick began well before either man was seriously talking about forming a metal band together. In 2020, Jesus released the jazz album Liminality, and Erick’s background in marketing became unexpectedly important to getting that music properly into the world.
Rather than treating Liminality as something Jesus could simply upload and forget about, Erick encouraged him to approach it as a real release, helping with distribution, marketing and the work happening behind the music itself. Jesus credits his cousin with helping the record reach far more people than it otherwise would have, but perhaps more importantly, the process taught them that they genuinely enjoyed working together.
Jesus would later play with Mexican metal band Orcus O Dis, joining a group that already had years of history behind it. When that chapter eventually fizzled out, the desire to make another record remained, and the person already sitting nearby with both a love of heavy music and a proven creative relationship with Jesus was Erick.
The idea was not initially, “Let’s form a band.” Jesus wanted to write something away from jazz, Erick had always loved music and harsh vocals, and working on songs together became another way for two cousins living apart to hang out and create.
Jesus would record instrumental ideas at home and send them across to Erick. At one point, what came back was no longer simply an idea or loose vocal experiment; it had verses, choruses and the shape of a complete song. One became two, two became three, and somewhere in that process the casual collaboration started demanding something more serious.
That something became Falsimonian.
FINDING A SOUND WITHOUT FORCING IT
Melodic death metal was the obvious common ground because it was the musical language Jesus and Erick had shared for years. The progressive, jazz, Mexican folk and broader Latin-American elements developed much more instinctively because, as Jesus puts it, those sounds are already “embedded” in who he is.
After years immersed in jazz harmony and growing up around Mexican and Latin music, Jesus does not have to consciously remind himself to include those influences. They naturally find their way into the choices he makes as a composer, whether that means rhythmic ideas, harmonic movement, keyboard textures or the way a riff is constructed.
That philosophy becomes important when listening to For Survival. Falsimonian are not trying to bolt a recognisable Latin section onto an otherwise conventional melodic death metal song and call it cultural identity. Those influences live inside the structures themselves, sometimes subtly enough that a listener may feel the flavour without immediately being able to identify where it is coming from.
TURNING TWO COUSINS INTO A FULL BAND
Once Jesus and Erick realised the songs were becoming something worth pursuing properly, they needed musicians who could turn the project into a complete band. Technical ability obviously mattered, but Jesus says there was another requirement sitting above almost everything else: they wanted people they actually liked.
Cesar Robles Sanchez and Mauricio “Moritz” Gonzalez joined in 2025, completing the Falsimonian lineup. Erick knew both musicians better initially, while Jesus had followed Cesar’s previous band years earlier and had even owned their shirts, making the chance to finally create music together particularly satisfying.
For Jesus, being excellent musicians was only part of the equation. Cesar and Mauricio were also good friends and people the band genuinely wanted to spend time around, something that matters even more when you are asking four musicians spread across different locations to build a project together.
WRITING A RECORD WITHOUT SHARING A ROOM
Falsimonian’s members are spread across the United States and Mexico, which means the traditional model of everybody piling into the same rehearsal room several nights a week simply does not exist. Instead, technology became part of the band’s creative language from the beginning.
Jesus would work in his home studio, sometimes writing a verse and chorus before sending the idea to Erick. While Erick developed lyrics and vocal parts, Jesus might already be building another instrumental section somewhere else in the record, allowing multiple songs to develop almost simultaneously.
Once Cesar and Mauricio joined the process, Discord sessions effectively became the rehearsal room. Jesus could present the current version of a song, ask for input and then watch the arrangement evolve in real time. Mauricio’s drum setup made that especially useful, with programmed ideas becoming starting points before the drummer interpreted them naturally behind the kit.
Jesus remembers moments where Mauricio would simply try something during those sessions, the rest of the band would immediately recognise that it worked, and another piece of the track would lock into place. Despite the distance, the process still retained that familiar feeling of musicians standing in a room throwing ideas at one another, with Jesus eventually taking responsibility as producer for pulling all those contributions into a cohesive song.
WHEN FOR SURVIVAL BECAME MORE THAN FIVE SONGS
For Survival was not initially mapped out as a five-track dystopian narrative. According to Jesus, the larger lyrical world came primarily from Erick, who began developing the idea from the earliest material they created together.
“Freefall” was the first song the cousins worked on, and even then Erick was already thinking about a fictional dystopian setting and a central character trying to exist inside it. The project would become less overtly science-fiction-driven as it developed, but the idea of following somebody through different emotional and psychological stages remained.
Jesus is careful not to describe For Survival as a traditional concept album, yet the songs undeniably work like chapters. As each new piece of music appeared, Erick developed the next part of that character’s journey until the band eventually found themselves with five tracks that belonged together.
The result is less interested in giant explosions or cinematic images of civilisation collapsing than it is in what happens to ordinary people who still have to wake up and live through that collapse. Burnout, manipulation, conflict, introspection and the search for something worth holding onto become more important than the catastrophe itself.
“FREEFALL” AND LIFE ON REPEAT
That idea appears immediately in “Freefall,” where the character is already exhausted before the world has even properly ended. Jesus approached the song with what he describes as a kind of musical “word painting,” looking for ways the arrangement itself could make the listener feel trapped inside the same emotional state as the lyrics.
Repetition became the key. The riffs keep cycling, creating the sensation of somebody stuck in the same pattern, and when Erick returned with lyrics describing life repeating on a loop, the musical and lyrical ideas suddenly reinforced one another.
Rather than simply telling the listener that the character feels burned out, Falsimonian wanted the song itself to create that experience. The repeated patterns become part of the storytelling, and that relationship between concept and composition continues throughout the EP.
ANGER TAKES OVER ON “THE ENEMY”
Where “Freefall” feels trapped, “The Enemy” becomes openly confrontational. Groove, thrash and black-metal elements push into the band’s melodic death foundation while the lyrical focus turns towards manipulation, hatred and people being driven against one another.
The aggression developed through another back-and-forth between the cousins. Jesus had already written part of the track’s thrash-driven main riff when Erick began responding lyrically, and once Jesus saw the anger in those words, the music became even more hostile.
Former Orcus O Dis vocalist Alfredo Rocha Sifuente also appears on the track, allowing Falsimonian to turn the vocals into something closer to a confrontation. Rather than simply bringing in another harsh vocalist for the sake of variety, the two voices effectively become opposing sides of an angry dialogue and reinforce the conflict sitting at the centre of the song.
PUSHING EVERYTHING FURTHER WITH “LIMITLESS”
“Limitless” is where Jesus really started asking how far he could push Falsimonian sonically. The track became an experiment in texture, ugliness and excess, with his recording session eventually containing around 20 separate synthesizer tracks.
Distorted synths, modulation and increasingly extreme guitar ideas began stacking on top of one another as Jesus searched for ways to make the sound broader and more chaotic. The process even pushed him from six-string guitar into buying a seven-string simply because he wanted access to a wider range and heavier textures.
Erick responded by altering his vocal approach to match what was happening instrumentally, and the track began living up to its title through what Jesus describes as an almost limitless expansion of sound. It is one of the clearest moments on the EP where experimentation stops being something happening around the edges and becomes part of the song’s entire identity.
WHEN JAZZ CRASHES INTO “JUDGMENT”
Then there is “Judgment,” probably the track where Jesus’ jazz background becomes impossible to ignore. Interestingly, much of For Survival was written on guitar rather than his primary instrument of piano, and working on an instrument he did not know as intimately forced him to trust his ear and stumble into shapes he might not otherwise have found.
“Judgment” also became the first track where Jesus and Cesar genuinely shared the composition, with riffs from both musicians feeding into the finished arrangement. As those pieces started coming together, Jesus realised the song was already leaning towards jazz harmonically and decided there was no reason to hold it back.
Minor-eleventh chords and unusual dominant sounds began creeping into the arrangement, but it was during the solo section where Jesus consciously approached the song from the perspective of a jazz musician. He found a progression that functioned almost like the repeating harmonic cycles used for improvisation in jazz and immediately heard somewhere he wanted to stretch out.
Jesus ultimately played the synth solo, naturally moving into blues-influenced phrasing, while Cesar found himself soloing over chord changes that pushed him outside more familiar metal territory. Rather than smoothing those differences away, Falsimonian leaned into them and allowed the collision of musical languages to become part of what makes the track distinctive.
HIDING THE CLAVE INSIDE MELODIC DEATH METAL
The title track may be the clearest statement yet of where Falsimonian can go. At its foundation sits a rhythmic idea based around the clave, one of the most important rhythmic concepts running throughout Latin-American music, but Jesus never wanted the listener to hear a metal song suddenly stopping so the band could announce that the “Latin part” had arrived.
The challenge was making those elements feel inseparable. For Jesus, the answer was keeping metal at the core and manipulating the clave into the language of melodic death metal riffs through palm-muted guitar patterns, open strings and melody moving around the underlying rhythm.
Someone familiar with the clave may be able to hear exactly what is happening, while another listener might simply recognise that there is a Latin flavour somewhere inside the track without consciously identifying its source. That subtlety is deliberate and perhaps captures Falsimonian’s broader musical philosophy better than anything else on the EP: culture is not being displayed as decoration; it is being allowed to shape how the songs actually move.
MUSIC MADE BY HUMANS, FOR HUMANS
For all the theory, technicality, genre collision and production experimentation sitting inside For Survival, Jesus’ final description of Falsimonian is surprisingly simple. He wants people to connect with the music first as metal fans, but also as people who recognise the ordinary struggles behind the lyrics.
Listeners will hear aggressive riffs, unusual harmony, technical playing, melody and plenty of heaviness, but underneath those elements are songs about burnout, conflict and the things people carry through everyday life. Jesus knows Falsimonian are not the only people experiencing those feelings, and that shared humanity matters more than demonstrating how many musical ideas the band can squeeze into five tracks.
“We just want them to relate to the music from a musical standpoint, but also from a lyrical standpoint,” Jesus explains, before arriving at what might be the most concise description of everything Falsimonian are trying to do.
“Music made by humans, for humans.”
For Survival arrives independently on November 7, 2026, and this first chapter may already be preparing to move beyond the studio. Before signing off, Jesus teased that Falsimonian could have live shows coming in December, meaning the remote project that began as two cousins sending ideas back and forth may soon find itself standing together on an actual stage.
For a band whose debut EP is built around surviving long enough to find something worth holding onto, that feels like a pretty fitting place for the next chapter to begin.
FALSIMONIAN ARE
Erick Valverde – Vocals
Jesus Fuentes Valverde – Guitars, Keyboards
Cesar Robles Sanchez – Lead Guitars
Mauricio “Moritz” Gonzalez – Drums
CONNECT WITH FALSIMONIAN
Official Website: https://falsimonian.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/falsimonian
Instagram: https://instagram.com/falsimonian
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@falsimonian
Discord: https://discord.gg/aU5TbnPF8M
