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The band are preparing Vida y obra de un titiritero, their first album in thirteen years, accompanied by a graphic novel that looks squarely at the wear and tear that caused their break-up and at the reasons that have led them to create together again
Standstill returned to the stage to reconnect with their songs, with their audience and, possibly, with themselves. What began in 2024 as a discreet one-off return after almost a decade of silence, and continued with the celebration of Vivalaguerra's twentieth anniversary, has ended up becoming something they had not initially counted on: a new creative phase and the band's first album since Dentro de la luz, released in 2013.
The new record will be titled Vida y obra de un titiritero and is scheduled for November. But before the music arrives, Enric Montefusco has published, together with illustrator Oriol Garcia Quera, a graphic novel with the same title, put out by Astiberri. The book is a self-contained work that shares characters, words, symbols and conflicts with the new album, and forms the first part of a universe Standstill have been revealing over recent months through interviews, meet-ups, presentations and small acoustic shows.
To understand the importance of this return it is not enough to count the years that have passed. You also have to look at the reasons that led Standstill to stop in 2015.
From what Montefusco has explained, the break-up does not seem to respond to a specific argument or a single event, but to a slow, continuous and unstoppable erosion born of a mixture of their intense way of creating, of working, of relating to the industry and even to one another.
And time and distance have changed some things. When Standstill played again in 2024, the response from the audience was even greater than the one that had accompanied their final years of activity. The songs had kept growing during their absence and the band discovered that their influence ran deeper than they had realised before stopping. According to Montefusco, the energy of the crowd, the attendance at the shows and the reception from promoters surpassed what they had left behind. The recognition that perhaps did not arrive at the right moment appeared over the years and ended up giving meaning to that first comeback tour.
The answer was not immediate, but during 2025 Montefusco began gathering ideas and lyrics that pointed in the same direction: his own story, the band's trajectory, artistic creation and the wear involved in defending a personal project against the outside world.
The emotional place from which the band works has also changed. Montefusco recalls that the early Standstill were driven by rage, frustration and a certain will to conquer a world they did not agree with. That fuel powered their hardcore and post-hardcore years and remained, in different ways, throughout their evolution until it ended up devouring them. Now, however, they say they are returning “from love and the desire to share what we are in a genuine way”.
Vida y obra de un titiritero tries to explain that journey without becoming a conventional biography. The graphic novel presents the symbolic journey of a creator who starts out full of excitement, passes through routine, exhaustion and collapse, and ends up recovering the meaning of what he was doing. The story has recognisable elements from Standstill's trajectory, but Montefusco and Garcia Quera have avoided documentary reconstruction in order to build a broader tale about anyone who has tried to protect a project of their own without betraying what brought it to life.
The album will also be titled Vida y obra de un titiritero and will be Standstill's first in thirteen years. Montefusco has offered few musical clues, but he has pointed out that the rest of the band feel more identified with this work than with some of their earlier records. Their aim would no longer be solely to win over those who know every stretch of their history, but to communicate more widely. As the musician himself has put it, it now matters more to communicate than to be liked.
Standstill came back to play songs that time had refused to wear down. Yet, on going through them again, the band found something that was not in the script: reasons to carry on. Vida y obra de un titiritero will not only be their first album since 2013. It will also be an attempt to explain why a project born of necessity can end up exhausting those who sustain it and how, after the silence, that same necessity can return in another form.