Medellín’s Underground Music: Metal Medallo, Punk and Comuna 13 Hip-Hop

Medellín’s underground music scene is real, documented, and more consequential than most cities can claim. In the 1980s, while the city was at its most violent, its working-class barrios produced a metal scene that reached Oslo and helped shape one of the most extreme genres in the world.

None of it is secret. All of it is written down.

The claim that makes this scene matter

Euronymous of Mayhem — the central figure of early Norwegian black metal — cited two Medellín bands as influences on his own music: Parabellum and Reencarnación. The contact ran through letters, and the connection was carried in large part by a Medellín correspondent, Mauricio “Bull Metal” Montoya, who acted as the bridge between the two scenes (Vice; El Tiempo — Tornamesa).

What Euronymous took from them was the dirty, raw sound. Parabellum’s 1987 track “Madre Muerte” is the one most often pointed to as prefiguring what black metal became (Invisible Oranges; Parabellum).

The genre those bands played had its own local name: ultra metal.

Metal Medallo: the 1980s scene

The scene grew in working-class barrios with a textile-industry labour tradition — Castilla, Aranjuez, Buenos Aires, Manrique and Villa Hermosa — not in the wealthy south of the city. A concert on 23 March 1985 is treated as the decisive moment for heavy music in Medellín.

Several of those bands became cult acts across Latin America and some are still active four decades later (Pulzo; Jot Down).

This is a properly researched subject. Juan Diego Parra-Valencia, an academic who studies the movement, directs the documentary series Metal Medallo (El Colombiano), and the scholarship includes “Metal Medallo: el estertor como estética de la violencia en Medellín de los años ochenta”.

Punk Medallo

Running alongside the metal scene was Punk Medallo, a countercultural movement that emerged in the same decade and the same barrios. Its main external influence was not American or British punk but Basque punk, and it formed explicitly as a response to the political and social violence of the city at the time (Infobae).

Its documented history runs to the present in the research “Hazlo tú mismo: Génesis y estructura de la escena Punk Medallo (1985–2016)” — the title itself, do it yourself, being the organising principle of a scene that built its own venues, labels and distribution because nothing else was available.

Comuna 13 hip-hop: Casa Kolacho

The current living underground scene most visitors can actually reach is hip-hop in Comuna 13.

Casa Kolacho opened in 2013 as a self-managed cultural centre. It is named for Héctor Pacheco, “Kolacho”, a member of the hip-hop collective C15, who was murdered on 24 August 2009. The house grew out of earlier organising around Élite Hip Hop (Casa Kolacho / El Colombiano).

It works as a school, a gallery, a shop, a meeting space, the base of the Graffitour, and a venue for rap battles and concerts. 4,000 young people have passed through it since it opened.

The model has been studied academically. “El hiphop como forma de resistencia frente al juvenicidio: la experiencia de Casa Kolacho” examines it as resistance to the killing of young people, published in the Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Niñez y Juventud (SciELO Colombia).

Son Batá is the other major Comuna 13 collective — Afro-Colombian, built around music and dance, with more than fifteen years of cultural work (Semana). Its co-founder Carlos Alberto Sánchez Mosquera, “Nene”, also founded the Terrazas Verdes rooftop farming project in the same barrio.

Where to hear it now: Altavoz

The city’s main platform for this music is Festival Altavoz, run since 2004 by the municipality and free to attend.

Recent editions have programmed 59 groups, and one anniversary edition ran 37 local bands, four from the department and nine national acts — the local-first ratio being the point of the thing (Alcaldía de Medellín — Festival Altavoz; Alcaldía de Medellín).

The associated Conciertos Ciudad Altavoz programme funds smaller shows across the city through public calls, which is where most of the current local acts actually play (El Espectador).

How to actually find shows

1. Check the Altavoz programme first. It is municipal, published in advance, and free.
2. Go to Casa Kolacho for hip-hop. Rap battles and concerts happen there, and a Comuna 13 graffitour booked through them puts the money in the neighbourhood.
3. The historic scene is northern and eastern, not El Poblado. Castilla, Aranjuez, Manrique and Buenos Aires are where this music came from.
4. Watch the documentary. Metal Medallo is the researched account of how it happened.

A note on this guide

This page was rebuilt from scratch in September 2026 and republished. The previous version was unpublished in this campaign because it could not be fact-checked: it quoted a named sound engineer who could not be verified to exist, invented venues including a “Sala Circuit” with a 200-member WhatsApp group and a monthly-rotating password, invented a performing collective and three musical genres, and carried no sources at all. Its central promise — venues “you can’t find online” — made every claim unfalsifiable by construction.

Everything on this page is sourced. The real scene did not need inventing: a city that influenced Norwegian black metal from a textile-workers’ barrio in 1985 is a better story than any secret door.