The paramount track off Los Niños Estelares’ latest EP Tragedias y Esperanzas en Tiempos de Internet has been put into live action by video directors Raul Alexander Marrero and Fernando Castro Alvarez. Earlier this year we highlighted “¿Cuándo va a caer la bomba?” as a song that “tackles the issue of a new Puerto Rican generation unwilling to compromise their lives to a form of totalitarian government.” In the clip, a teenager panics after receiving a collections warning from the Philanthropic Bank, the first of many misfortunes for an aspiring farmer kid whose exposure to mass data has pushed him into a suffocating corner where the only thing left to do is wait for "the drop of the bomb."
The duo’s sense of tragedy, misery, and relief are wonderfully vivid and cynical. The clip, premiered this week by Puerto Rico Indie, starts phenomenally well and it only gets better as it goes along. It flows above the waters of the duo’s quirky aesthetics and both directors seem to understand the Niño Estelar dialect better than all of us. At the end of the video, the kid is liberated from his pain and is given a sword, carrying on with the responsibility of liberating his enslaved peers.