The Warning Against Sloth

The Warning and the problem of noise

It is easy to underestimate The Warning at first glance. Three sisters from Monterrey, Mexico, who first came to attention through a viral Metallica “Enter Sandman” cover as teenagers. It would be natural to expect something charming but fleeting, a novelty destined to be absorbed into the endless churn of online ephemera. Yet what has unfolded since that early burst of attention has been something far more intriguing: a band that has not only persisted but matured into a serious artistic voice, capable of grappling with questions many artists twice their age and experience avoid altogether.

Having grown up playing the video game Rock Band, fans of older rock and metal will be able to hear influences from 30, 40, and 50 years ago: guitar play influenced by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour, drumming reminiscent of Neil Peart, and a driving bass line. All three sisters sing, with guitarist Daniela Villarreal Vélez normally providing an aggressive, belting lead, drummer Paulina a higher, sweeter tone, and bassist Alejandra a smooth alto. The band itself often lists Metallica, Muse, Queen, Halestorm, and Paul McCartney, among others, which results in an eclectic musical alchemy that digs into some progressive and experimental rock veins while always maintaining a catchiness friendly to commercial appeal.

While their technical skill is undeniable, technical ability alone does not account for their significance. From their earliest releases, they have shown a preoccupation with the effects of modern life on the human spirit, exploring themes of identity, alienation, and the struggle to remain intact in a culture that seems designed to dissolve our interior coherence.

Their first full-length album, XXI Century Blood, released in 2017 when the sisters were still in their teens, introduced listeners to a sensibility that was already alert to the distortions of the digital age. Though it bore the rough edges that one might expect from such a young band—featuring some typical-for-the-genre teen breakup material, inter alia—it was musically and lyrically precocious. For instance, that album’s title track already evinces an interest in the harmful effects of digital culture, although expressed without much nuance:

Everyone’s in depression because of an obsession
With stereotypes around the world
Worldwide starvation, but in this situation
No one seems to care at all
Our communication replaced by animation
Television has control
Every question answered, internet demands us
To worship it like a god

The follow-up, Queen of the Murder Scene, took a more narrative and psychological turn, producing a metal concept album telling the story of a love turned obsessive and murderous, but with hints of greater depth than one would expect out of a teen metal band. For instance, the opening track, “Dut to Dust,” features these lyrics:

Hey, come on in, walk this way
Look what I have prepared to show you
Let me show you
How things can quickly unfold
In the end, everything just turns back
Turns back into

Dust to dust, our bones will rust
And we shall start again

It was with 2022’s Error, however, that The Warning came into their own thematically. In that album, one hears not only the familiar frustration with media saturation and misinformation but a more profound sense of loss: the loss of shared reality, of stable meaning, of the possibility of authentic selfhood in an environment where every thought and feeling can be packaged and sold. The band does not explicitly cite figures like Neil Postman or Marshall McLuhan, but one senses a parallel intuition—that our technologies have not merely changed what we consume but have reshaped our perception of the world and our very capacity to inhabit it fully.

The progression from Error to Keep Me Fed, released in 2024, is not so much a shift as it is a deepening. Where Error confronted the external chaos of a world awash in disinformation and spectacle, Keep Me Fed turns inward to examine the spiritual aftershocks of that collapse. Rather than exploding in anger or settling for a cheap catharsis, the new album dwells in a more difficult space: the dull ache of spiritual exhaustion, the sensation of being unable to summon true desire or joy even amid endless stimulation.

At first glance, the album’s title and imagery might suggest a meditation on hunger or even gluttony, but in reality, it gestures toward something older and more elusive: acedia. This ancient term, almost forgotten in modern moral vocabulary, describes not mere laziness or sloth but a deep weariness with the good, a restless refusal to engage with the demands of one’s own vocation and ultimate end. Keep Me Fed does not describe an appetite for more pleasure, but a desperate plea against an inner emptiness that no quantity of noise or novelty can fill.

For instance, “More” wails,

You know you love it
You love it when I need you
Do you need me? Yeah
You know I love it
I love it when you feed me
Yet you leave me begging for more

(Keep me here)
(In the clear)
I want it and you know it (Keep me here)
Starved, but never show it (In the clear)
You like it when I’m broken (Keep me here)
You like it when I’m broken (In the clear)

“More” seems to tell about the perverse relationship between audience and celebrity in the world of social media, which starves as it keeps on stuffing.

Mapping the drift toward acedia

When considering the trajectory that led The Warning to Keep Me Fed, it becomes clear that their work has always gestured toward a diagnosis of modern estrangement, even if their earliest records did not yet name it explicitly. Their debut album, XXI Century Blood, was filled with a kind of raw, youthful urgency, expressing disillusionment with systems of control and the numbing effects of constant mediation. Yet beneath its directness lay an early intuition that the problem was not simply political or social but existential—that what was at stake was not merely freedom from manipulation but personal integrity.

Their second album, Queen of the Murder Scene, released only a year later, moved beyond broad critiques of societal forces to probe the psychology of obsession and collapse. Constructed as a sort of rock opera, the record traced the descent of a protagonist consumed by her own desires, ultimately losing her bearings and sense of self. While at first glance it might appear melodramatic, the album’s narrative reveals a deeper concern with the consequences of surrendering to ungoverned appetite, to loves and longings severed from any higher purpose or love. In that sense, the album stands as a study in what happens when the soul, no longer directed toward the good, turns destructively inward.

The shift from these early records to 2022’s Error marked a moment of thematic crystallization. Where the previous works gestured toward internal struggle, Error focused squarely on the external environment that exacerbates and exploits that struggle. The album is saturated with images of disorientation and surveillance, of a world in which every moment is mediated, every feeling flattened and made exchangeable, emphasized by the album cover’s evocative image of a female dancer in a flowing, white dress set against a blue and white colored room incongruously wearing a VR headset that glows an ominous red.

Here the band captures the way digital abundance corrodes authority and undermines our shared sense of reality, leaving individuals trapped in a vortex of endless information but little understanding. The lyrics, filled with references to algorithms, control, and performative identity, depict not simply a generation lost in its own illusions but a generation that no longer trusts its own capacity to perceive and act meaningfully.

The title track, “Error,” makes the point starkly:

You want people to love you
It’s encoded in your greed
I will give you the power
But I need you to cede control
Zero, one, one, zero, zero, one, one
Zero, zero, one, one, one, zero, zero, one
Zero, zero, one, one, zero, zero, one, zero, one
Zero, one, one, zero, zero, one, zero, one
Human naturе in question
Flawed and broken in silеnce
It’s never the intention, just progress

Yet if Error diagnosed the collapse of the outer world—its institutions, its social ties, its moral frameworks, its bonds of trust—Keep Me Fed turns the lens inward to examine the spiritual consequences of that collapse. In a culture where everything is designed to seize attention and accelerate desire, the result is not, as one might expect, an excess of passion or even simple hedonism, but rather a deep, anesthetizing boredom. This is the essence of acedia, as understood by ancient Christian writers: not a mere laziness or inertia but a settled indifference to the good, a refusal to be moved by what ought to stir the heart.

Acedia arises when the human soul, designed to rest in God and oriented toward the true and the beautiful, instead becomes weighed down by distractions and false substitutes. It is a state marked not so much by sinning too much as by desiring too little—by the inability or unwillingness to direct oneself toward any final good. In Keep Me Fed, The Warning captures this condition with unsettling precision. The album does not rage against the system or offer facile solutions; instead, it inhabits the quiet, suffocating space where one can no longer even remember what it felt like to truly want something beyond the next moment’s stimulus.

What emerges across these records, and especially in this most recent one, is a kind of cultural self-portrait: a generation surrounded by constant noise and novelty, yet slowly starving for meaning. While earlier works named the forces pressing in from without, Keep Me Fed names the hollowed interior that remains when those forces have done their work. The album thus stands as both a personal lament and a social mirror, reflecting a culture that has lost its capacity to desire the good.

Songs from the edge of desire

When listening to Keep Me Fed, one finds plenty of clever hooks, instrumental bombast, and catchy grooves. But its deeper force comes from its cumulative storytelling. Each track serves as a facet of a larger portrait, revealing a soul that has grown tired not from lack of stimulation but from its relentless surfeit—a person weighed down not by scarcity but by endless, unanchored abundance.

The opening track, “S!ck,” sets the tone with an immediacy that is both sonic and existential. The song pulses with energy, yet its lyrics describe a profound ambivalence:

Bleeding just to feel alive
I’m rotting in my place
Life is nothing more than passing time

The band captures the paradox at the heart of acedia. Here is a condition marked not by absence of feeling but by a glut so pervasive that no single desire can rise above the static. The song embodies the restless movement of a soul unable to rest in anything truly good, yet unable to stop searching.

Similarly, in “MORE,” the repetition of the titular demand is not triumphant or even defiant but sounds almost desperate, as though the self has been reduced to a single, ceaseless craving without content. There is no clear object of desire; there is only the cry for “more,” an unnamed “something,” echoing without hope of surfeit. The musical arrangement reinforces this exhaustion, pressing forward with a kind of mechanical insistence, as though the band themselves are enacting the compulsions they are critiquing.

The middle section of the album, including songs like “Escapism” and “Burnout,” moves into more subdued territory, not to offer comfort but to explore the quieter aspects of spiritual fatigue. In “Escapism,” the impulse to flee is presented not as a solution but as another symptom, a way of slipping into yet another layer of unreality rather than confronting the starkness of true emptiness:

Stepping into the void
Even if it amounts to nothing
Silence is to avoid
Rеaching out to hold on to something
I wish I could enjoy
Worthless mеans of communicating
Words that only destroy
Leave me feeling, fearing, oh

“Burnout,” in turn, feels like a confession given in a hushed voice, a recognition that even one’s resistance has become performative, drained of genuine energy and intent. The vocals on these tracks often feel weary, pulling back rather than reaching out, mirroring the spiritual lassitude that defines the album.

Yet even in this bleakness, there is a subtle, almost hidden possibility. By diagnosing acedia, The Warning hints, however faintly, at the possibility of real renewal. It’s obviously important not to oversell The Warning’s insight: they aren’t Bob Dylan. Nor is there much that is redolent of religion or, despite their diagnoses, any indication that they would prescribe what Walker Percy would, given their diagnosis. But in the end, Keep Me Fed draws our attention insistently to one of the main maladies of our age, and therefore invites the to consider what it might mean to be truly alive, to rediscover a longing for a way out of what Walker Percy referred to as the vacuole of the self and toward what is good, true, and enduring.