Twenty-five years after its release, Rekiem’s Apgar:0 remains one of the defining records of Chilean aggrometal.
Released on Jan. 15, 2001 through Sónica Records, Rekiem’s second album arrived at the height of a movement that gave Chile its own name for the nu metal explosion happening around the world. Gino Fuenzalida would later explain that “aggro” grew from a distinctly Chilean combination of agro — something rough, handmade, and done through sheer effort — and the English word “aggressive.” More than a genre tag, it became the name of a scene with its own bands, venues, festivals, fashion, and audience.
Apgar:0 became one of its essential records because Rekiem did more than reproduce what Korn, Deftones, Faith No More, or the wider alternative metal world were doing abroad. They filtered those influences through Chile.
That context carries particular weight revisiting the album on September 11.
On September 11, 1973, Chile’s Armed Forces overthrew President Salvador Allende in a military coup, beginning the dictatorship ultimately led by Augusto Pinochet. The Nixon administration had spent years working to destabilize Allende’s government through political and economic pressure and covert action while strengthening its relationship with the Chilean military. The dictatorship lasted until 1990, leaving thousands dead or disappeared and tens of thousands recognized as victims of political imprisonment and torture.
Apgar:0 was made barely a decade after Chile returned to democracy.
Its core lineup featured Fuenzalida on vocals, founding guitarist and backing vocalist Julián Durney, Carlos Rojas on bass, and Álvaro Vidal on drums. Keyboardist Daniel Pierattini would also become part of Rekiem during the album’s cycle.
Durney explained the album’s title to Rockaxis in 2001 through the Apgar score, the medical assessment used to evaluate newborns. A score of zero represented, in Rekiem’s metaphor, no response at all. The band applied that image to what they saw as a Chilean country, society, and youth that had been put to sleep.
That idea — sleep versus consciousness — becomes one of the most useful ways to understand Apgar:0.
Not every song is explicitly political. Far from it. The record constantly moves between social anger and intensely personal collapse: failed relationships, self-loathing, dependency, guilt, isolation, and depression. But even when the subject turns inward, the same language keeps returning. People fall. People cannot stand back up. They cannot breathe. Their eyes are closed. They numb themselves rather than feel what is happening.
The album opens relatively gently with “104,” a song about disappointment, broken promises, excuses, and verbal violence set against a balance of melody and distortion. Its themes could belong to any number of bands or genres, but one line immediately establishes the record’s worldview: “If this hurts, it’s because you know it’s real.”
Pain and truth will remain connected throughout Apgar:0.
“No Respires” pushes considerably further inward. The disappointment in someone else becomes a complete psychological breakdown marked by shame, exhaustion, and self-hatred: “I’ve been dead inside so many times / Breathing almost doesn’t matter anymore.” Elsewhere, the narrator admits that he knows the ground so well that even its smell has become familiar.
It is one of the first places where the album’s obsession with falling becomes impossible to miss.
Musically, guttural vocals collide with Fuenzalida’s more melodic delivery over the kind of low, physical riffing that immediately locates Rekiem inside the nu metal vocabulary of the period. Lyrically, however, “No Respires” is less interested in anger than in what happens after that anger has already turned against the self.
Then comes “Traga.”
The song became the album cycle’s first major single, with Ricardo Olguín directing its video. It eventually reached No. 1 on MTV Latin America’s Los 10 Más Pedidos, while “No Respires” followed as the second single.
“Traga” is also where Apgar:0 makes its political intentions impossible to misunderstand.
“Swallow, swallow the lies,” Fuenzalida commands before attacking nationalism itself: “Sick nation / Cheap dreams / Freedom in a cage.”
Television becomes “that fucking idiot box that puts you to sleep,” while unquestioned patriotism is presented as another drug fed to a passive population. The target is not simply the Chilean flag, but the idea that national symbols should automatically command obedience.
One of the song’s sharpest lines requires some Chilean context. Rekiem repeat, “Esta es la copia infeliz del Edén” — “This is the unhappy copy of Eden.” Chile’s national anthem famously describes the country as la copia feliz del Edén, “the happy copy of Eden.” Rekiem change one word and dismantle the entire patriotic image.
By the end, “Traga” is calling for “fire to your flag.”
It was a confrontational image, but Durney was explicit about how Rekiem intended it. Speaking to Rockaxis in 2001, he described the band’s political writing as denunciation rather than literal instruction. The goal was to make listeners react and think, not simply imitate what the lyrics said.
“Todos Flotan” abruptly returns inward.
Its title seems like a likely nod to Stephen King’s It — “todos flotan” literally means “everyone floats” — although no found source confirms that Durney or the band ever explained it as such.
The song itself has nothing to do with killer clowns or sewers. Instead, it describes an intimate relationship collapsing through lost desire, resentment, guilt, boredom, and emotional dependence. “I feel your skin, but I’d rather masturbate,” Fuenzalida sings, immediately stripping the relationship of romanticism.
Yet the narrator does not simply hate the other person: “I don’t hate you / I actually love you.”
That contradiction is what makes “Todos Flotan” more uncomfortable than a conventional breakup song. The relationship still contains love, but it has also erased something essential from both people. Its emotional peak arrives with another image of falling: “Let me try, slip, and fail.”
“Error 07” follows as a 57-second sound-design interlude rather than a conventional song. Today, its intimate collage of clinical sounds and communications interference might almost be described as ASMR-like, evoking hospitalization, isolation, and some form of broken connection, whether literal or metaphorical.
That medical imagery also feels appropriate on an album named after a neonatal test.
“Di Nada” continues the inward spiral with screaming vocals and abrasive guitars. Once again, the narrator takes responsibility for being unable to keep himself upright: “I couldn’t stay on my feet / Don’t believe in me anymore.”
The song moves from “No Respires” declaring “There’s nobody worse than me” to “Di Nada” reducing the self even further: “To you, I am nothing.”
But its most significant line may be simpler: “Forgiveness won’t erase all the pain.”
It works perfectly within a failed relationship, but it also gains additional resonance on an album repeatedly concerned with guilt, responsibility, and consequences. Forgiveness does not restore what was damaged. Some wounds survive it.
Then “Martina” changes everything.
Dedicated to Durney’s daughter, the song replaces resentment and self-destruction with parental love and the transformation brought by another person’s birth.
“You opened my eyes / Just by breathing.”
That is an especially striking line within Apgar:0. “No Respires” had made breathing nearly meaningless. “Traga” described a citizen with closed eyes. Now the simple act of a child breathing opens them again.
“My blood is yours / My life is yours,” Fuenzalida sings before reaching the song’s defining promise: “I’ll look through your eyes / To help you grow.”
The bass, already prominent throughout the record, becomes especially expressive here as softer, lower vocals eventually build into larger harmonies. “Martina” is one of the album’s rare moments where connection to another person does not destroy the narrator. It rebuilds him.
Durney died by suicide in October 2004, three years after Apgar:0 was released. That knowledge inevitably adds another layer to some of the album’s darkest material, but it would be a mistake to retroactively reduce every line of the record to autobiography. “Martina,” in particular, is worth remembering as evidence that Apgar:0 contains tenderness alongside all of its rage.
Then comes what may be the most important song on the album.
“Claroscuro” remains uncomfortable 25 years later in a Chile that still operates under a heavily amended version of the Constitution enacted under Pinochet’s dictatorship, with the political, economic, and institutional legacy of that period still part of the national conversation.
And unlike many of the album’s songs, there is no mystery about its primary target.
Durney confirmed that “Claroscuro” refers to Ricardo Claro Valdés, one of Chile’s most powerful businessmen at the time. Claro controlled interests including the TV channel Mega, the newspapers Diario Financiero and Capital, Cristalerías Chile, and Compañía Sudamericana de Vapores. He had also served as an economic adviser to the dictatorship’s Foreign Ministry between 1973 and 1975.
The title itself turns his last name into an accusation: Claro becomes oscuro — light becomes dark.
“Who censors, punishes, and forbids? / Who decides for you what is good?” Rekiem ask before naming him directly.
The song attacks civilian elites that worked with or benefited from the dictatorship and retained enormous economic, political, and media influence after democracy returned. It culminates in one of Apgar:0’s most devastating questions:
“What good is democracy if murderers protect it?”
The context matters. When Rekiem wrote those words, Pinochet had only recently been arrested in London, Chile still had designated senators and other authoritarian mechanisms inherited from the dictatorship, and the transition to democracy remained visibly incomplete.
“Claroscuro” finally gives its listener an instruction:
“Open your eyes / Cut the strings.”
It directly reverses the imagery from “Traga.” The eyes that were closed must now open.
And then comes the slogan: “Look the enemy in the face.”
That phrase did not exist only inside the song. Rekiem incorporated it into the visual concept surrounding Apgar:0, placing recognizable political and public figures including Pinochet, Claro, Joaquín Lavín, and Pablo Longueira alongside it.
Without losing any intensity, “M.L.C.a.E.” — short for “Mírale La Cara al Enemigo,” or “Look the Enemy in the Face” — expands “Claroscuro” from an attack on one businessman into an assault on an entire network of military figures, politicians, religious personalities, media outlets, and television culture.
Gastón “Cenzi” Gabarró, keyboardist, composer, and producer with Chilean hip-hop group Makiza, joins Rekiem on the track. Durney later recalled that Gabarró quickly connected with the song’s subject matter and wrote his own verse.
The result is Rekiem’s most explicit collision with rap metal, but nothing about it feels imported from the United States.
Its references are aggressively Chilean.
Longueira, Bombal, Lavín, Hasbún, El Mercurio, Canal 13, Cecilia Bolocco, Gonzalo Bertrán, Kike Morandé, and Viva el Lunes all appear within a song accusing the machinery of politics and mass media of keeping people passive, distracted, and asleep.
Even “Viva el lunes, viva el cambio” carries two simultaneous references: Viva el Lunes was one of Chilean television’s defining entertainment shows of the 1990s, while “Viva el cambio” had been Joaquín Lavín’s 1999 presidential campaign slogan.
The chorus brings the album’s recurring imagery into focus:
“You’ll never stand up / With your eyes closed.”
Falling and seeing have become connected. You cannot get back on your feet until you are willing to look.
“Ariete” returns to personal relationships, but unlike the self-directed collapse of “No Respires” or “Di Nada,” its resentment is aimed squarely at another person. The narrator knows he has been lied to and humiliated, yet remains emotionally dependent on the person responsible.
“With pain you learn what you don’t want to know,” Fuenzalida sings.
That line echoes “104” perfectly. Once again, pain is not merely suffering. Pain reveals the truth.
The song even introduces another form of anesthesia through the phrase “your soft morphine,” an image that becomes especially important once the record reaches its hidden ending.
“Cautiverio” is the album’s final major reduction in sonic aggression. Distorted guitars and heavy percussion remain, but Fuenzalida’s melodic vocals create an unsettling contrast with one of the record’s cruelest lyrics.
There is no known statement from Rekiem confirming its subject, but reading “Cautiverio” in the context of Augusto Pinochet is difficult to avoid.
While Apgar:0 was being written, Pinochet had spent more than 500 days under arrest in London as Spanish courts sought his extradition over crimes committed during the dictatorship. He was released on medical grounds and returned to Chile in March 2000.
“Sooner or later, you had to pay,” the song repeats. “You’re not who you used to be.”
Later, the narrator mocks someone wealthy and physically deteriorating whose conscience supposedly will not allow him to sleep “in your golden cradle.”
If the Pinochet reading is correct, “Cautiverio” turns his age, health, privilege, and temporary loss of freedom into a form of judgment.
It ends without forgiveness:
“Send a postcard from hell.”
“Catalifaud” brings the official running order to its apparent conclusion.
Its title is a real French surname, and the lyrics address someone directly, accusing them of using power to frame one man while hiding the actual guilty party. Yet despite the specificity of “I know your name, Catalifaud,” there's no reliable source establishing exactly who the target was.
Claims circulating online connecting the song to an ancestor of Durney are not backed by the sources usually cited to support them.
The mystery is better left intact.
What is clear is the accusation: corruption, concealment, abuse of power, and revenge, ultimately reduced to “eye for an eye.”
And then, in classic early-2000s fashion, the album refuses to actually end.
On the original CD, “Catalifaud” contained a hidden song. After the apparent conclusion and a long stretch of silence, “Novocaína” finally emerged deep inside the same track. Modern streaming editions have sensibly separated it as the album’s 13th and final song.
That makes “Novocaína” easier to find, but the original presentation gave it a different function: it felt like an epilogue discovered only after the listener thought Apgar:0 had already said everything it needed to say.
Instead, it summarizes much of the record.
“Connected, dependent, without reaction,” the narrator sings. Pain disappears through a powerful drug, but so does freedom.
“Flying inside myself / Trapped, I am no longer free.”
The drug itself can be read literally, but the second verse expands the metaphor back toward the media criticism of “Traga” and “M.L.C.a.E.”: faces inside boxes tell the narrator exactly what he wants to hear, lying to him and pushing reality further away.
Anesthesia, entertainment, dependency, sleep — they all become variations of the same escape.
“Sweet dreams,” the song offers.
That phrase should sound comforting. By this point in Apgar:0, it sounds almost threatening.
The album has repeatedly asked its listener to open their eyes, stand up, breathe, and confront what hurts. “Novocaína” imagines the opposite: a person who has finally discovered how to stop feeling any of it.
And Apgar:0 returns one final time to the image that has followed it from the beginning:
“I watched it fall without pain.”
In “104,” falling forced the narrator to feel “cold reality.” In “No Respires,” he knew the ground intimately. “Traga” watched another person fall. “Todos Flotan” asked for the freedom to slip and fail. “Di Nada” could no longer remain standing. “M.L.C.a.E.” warned that anyone with closed eyes would never stand up at all.
By “Novocaína,” the fall no longer hurts.
Not because the fall has stopped, but because the person falling has finally become numb.
That is why Apgar:0 remains such an effective record 25 years later.
Its debt to the nu metal of its era is obvious, and contemporary critics heard Korn and Deftones in Rekiem from the beginning. But its lasting achievement was making those sounds speak Chilean Spanish and forcing them into a specifically Chilean reality.
Only 11 days after the album’s release, Rekiem opened for Deftones in Santiago. The following year, they opened for Korn. Those concerts helped cement a movement that, at its height, produced its own circuit, festivals, style, stores, and youth culture.
Yet Apgar:0 survives beyond that moment because the record never depended entirely on a scene.
Twenty-five years later, Chile has changed enormously, but many of the questions inside Apgar:0 remain recognizable: Who controls what we see? Who gets to ask for forgiveness? What happens when a democracy inherits the structures of a dictatorship? How much pain can a person absorb before they stop feeling it? And what does it take to open your eyes again?
Rekiem did not offer answers.
As Durney said at the time, telling people what to do would simply be another form of dictatorship.
Instead, Apgar:0 tried to be an alarm clock.
Twenty-five years later, it is still loud enough to wake people up.
