EMQs With Kilometro 1

Hi everyone! Welcome to another EMQs interview, this time with Kilometro 1. Huge thanks to their vocalist Lily Kerrigan for taking part.

What is your name, what do you play and can you tell us a little bit about the history of the band?

My name is Lily Kerrigan. I am the vocalist of Kilometro1 and a co-author of its lyrics and musical arrangements. Together with Alwin Rooijackers, I help shape not only the sound of the band but also the ideas, research, and visual language that surround each release.

Kilometro1 began as an independent Mexican rock and metal project and gradually grew into something more difficult—and more interesting—to classify. Heavy guitars remain at its centre, but our music now moves through orchestral, gothic, pagan, and folk colours. We are drawn to songs that can carry both physical energy and an inner world: a historical question, an old name, a landscape, or a character whose voice was not preserved.

Our discography includes Sobreviviente (2017), Renacer (2019), The Final Legend (2020), and Circle of Nine (2026). In 2018, we toured the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium. That journey changed the scale of our imagination: it showed us that music made independently in Puebla could enter into conversation with listeners, places, and traditions far beyond Mexico.

My background in Language and Literature strongly influences the way I write. I am fascinated by what happens when a story crosses from one language into another, from oral tradition into a written chronicle, or from an old legend into a contemporary song. For us, music is not an illustration placed behind those ideas; it is the language through which we examine them.

 

How did you come up with your band name?

The name did not emerge in a rehearsal room or from a long list of dramatic possibilities. It found us on a motorway.

Alwin and I were travelling in his van towards our first opportunity to perform live. We were discussing what to call the project when we passed a road marker indicating kilometre one. We looked at it and understood immediately: that was the name.

It captured everything we were feeling. We had not arrived anywhere; we were only beginning. The road ahead contained the concerts we had not yet played, the music we had not written, the countries we did not know we would visit, and the people who would eventually become part of the story.

That is why Kilometro1 remains meaningful to us. It is not a monument to a destination but a reminder of the courage required to start. Every album, stage, language, mistake, and discovery has been another section of the same road—and, in a way, we are still at kilometre one whenever we begin a new song.

 

What Country / Region are you from and what is the Metal / Rock scene like there?

We are from Puebla, Mexico. It is a city where different historical and cultural layers remain visible at the same time: Indigenous histories and living communities, colonial architecture, religious and popular traditions, archaeological landscapes, universities, markets, and a contemporary urban life that continually transforms them. Growing up in that environment teaches you that culture is never a single, frozen object. It is made of encounters, tensions, survivals, and reinterpretations.

The local rock and metal scene is passionate, but original independent bands often have to create their own opportunities. You learn to become more than a performer: you organise, produce, design, promote, document, solve technical problems, and occasionally carry equipment up a staircase while still trying to look mysterious!

That independence has shaped our character. Kilometro1 is rooted in Mexico, but curiosity keeps our windows open to the world. We are interested in how a Dutch legend, a European musical language, a Mexican sensibility, and a modern metal audience can meet without erasing their differences.

 

What is your latest release? (Album, EP, Single, Video)

Our latest release is Circle of Nine, our fourth studio album, released independently on 27 May 2026. Musically, it brings together rock and metal with orchestral, gothic, pagan, and folk elements. Conceptually, it reflects our growing interest in the relationship between folklore, language, memory, and power.

At the centre of the album is a four-song sequence—Witte Wieven, The Circle of Nine, The Trial, and The Silent Curse—inspired by the Witte Wieven of Dutch folklore. The songs imagine nine women moving from gathering and shared knowledge to accusation, judgement, and the survival of their story.

We do not present the cycle as a documentary reconstruction. It is an artistic interpretation born from research and from a very contemporary question: what happens when a community begins to fear women who meet, speak, heal, know, or simply refuse to fit the role assigned to them? Some of the women in our imagined circle may practise rituals; others may simply be ordinary women seeking a space in which to speak freely. Neither condition makes them evil.

What interests us most is the transformation of a narrative. A figure may begin in oral memory, acquire another meaning in a written account, become an object of fear, and later return through art. The album listens to those changes and asks whose voice was preserved, whose was distorted, and whose disappeared.

 

Who have been your greatest influences?

Our musical influences come from different worlds. Iron Maiden and Metallica taught us the physical architecture of metal: the riff, the momentum, and the communal energy of a live performance. Nightwish showed how metal and orchestration could create an immense narrative space, while Lacrimosa demonstrated that gothic darkness, classical language, rock, and poetic intensity could coexist without losing emotional directness.

Wardruna is important to us for another reason. Their work shows that tradition can be approached through serious research and still become living contemporary art. We are inspired by that respect for sources, instruments, language, and landscape, even though our own cultural position and musical vocabulary are different.

Beyond bands, we are nourished by classical composers, traditional music, mythology, literature, linguistics, cinema, and the sound of languages themselves. A word can suggest a rhythm before it has a melody; a place name can contain the trace of an older belief; an instrument can reveal how a community understood celebration, mourning, work, or the sacred.

We are not trying to collect exotic sounds. We are interested in the human reasons those sounds exist. The question behind our influences is usually not “How can we imitate this?” but “What kind of world, memory, or experience made this music necessary?”

 

What first got you into music?

There was no single lightning-bolt moment. Music entered my life gradually, almost like a language I had been speaking before I knew its grammar.

I was always drawn to words and to the inner lives people do not easily reveal. Literature taught me that a sentence can contain several meanings at once; singing taught me that breath, silence, texture, and a single vowel can reveal what the sentence is unable to explain. A lyric can describe a wound, but the voice tells you where that wound lives in the body.

The stage completed that discovery. Something written in solitude could pass through music and become a shared experience among strangers. It did not stop belonging to me, but it no longer belonged only to me.

That is what drew me into music and continues to hold me there. It is the place where my identities as a singer, writer, interpreter, and songwriter can meet—and occasionally argue with one another until the song becomes better.

 

If you could collaborate with a current band or musician who would it be?

I would choose Wardruna. What fascinates me is not simply the atmosphere of their music, but the discipline behind it: research, historical instruments, language, nature, ritual, and the transformation of old materials into something contemporary and emotionally immediate.

Kilometro1 and Wardruna come from different cultural and musical positions, which is precisely why the encounter could be interesting. I would not want to place one of their instruments on top of a metal track merely to make it sound “ancient.” I would want a real conversation about source, meaning, rhythm, and memory.

I imagine organic percussion and vocal textures meeting our guitars, orchestral arrangements, and narrative writing. The most exciting collaboration would be one in which neither artist used the other as decoration, and both emerged having discovered a sound they could not have created alone.

 

If you could play any festival in the world, which would you choose and why?

I would love to perform at Castlefest in the Netherlands. It is more than a music festival: it is a meeting place for mythology, literature, historical imagination, performance, craftsmanship, folk traditions, and complete visual worlds. Audiences there understand that fantasy and folklore are not necessarily forms of escape; they can also be ways of examining identity, memory, and the stories societies choose to keep.

The Netherlands already has an important place in our history because we toured there in 2018. It is also the cultural landscape that inspired the four-song Witte Wieven sequence on Circle of Nine.

Taking those songs to Castlefest would feel like completing a circle. We would arrive not as owners of that tradition, but as Mexican artists returning an interpretation to the place that awakened it in us—and inviting the audience to tell us what they recognise, what we transformed, and what the legend means to them now.

 

What’s the weirdest gift you have ever received from a fan?

Someone once gave me lollipops decorated with my face. There is no artistic training that prepares you to discover that you have become confectionery!

I have also learnt that some listeners use photographs of me as their phone wallpapers, and one person had a banner with my face printed for a birthday celebration. For a moment, it is very surreal: you think, “How did my face arrive at this party before I did?”

But these gifts are much sweeter than strange. Beneath the humour is something genuinely moving: a person listened to the music, felt close enough to the project to create something, and allowed us into a small part of their private world. I never take that affection lightly.

 

If you had one message for your fans, what would it be?

Stay curious longer than you stay certain. Ask where a story came from, who told it, who was excluded from it, and what might change if another voice were allowed to speak.

Do not wait until you feel completely ready to begin something meaningful. We certainly did not. Every long road begins at its first kilometre, and much of who we become is discovered only after we have started moving.

And to everyone who has listened, attended a concert, shared a song, translated a lyric, asked a thoughtful question, or travelled any part of this road with us: thank you. You are not standing outside the work. You have helped give it another life.

 

If you could bring one rock star back from the dead, who would it be?

My first choice would be Michael Jackson. He understood performance as a complete artistic language: voice, rhythm, movement, costume, image, suspense, and meticulous rehearsal all served the same emotional idea. I would love to see what he might create with today’s technology—and whether he would still demand another take when everyone else thought it was already perfect.

If Ever Metal allowed me to bend the definition of “rock star,” I would also be tempted to bring back Camille Saint-Saëns or Erik Satie. I would happily spend an afternoon introducing them to synthesisers, electric guitars, film scores, and modern recording software, then watch them either become fascinated or ask to be returned immediately to the nineteenth century.

 

What do you enjoy the most about being a musician? And what do you hate?

What I enjoy most is watching an intimate idea become communal. A song may begin with two people discussing a word, a melody, or a fragment of history in a room. Months later, an audience is singing it back, and each person has attached a private memory to it. The song has travelled beyond its authors without becoming anonymous.

What I enjoy least is the amount of invisible labour that can surround the music. An independent artist may have to become a publicist, archivist, designer, scheduler, producer, data analyst, and technical support department before breakfast—and then find enough silence to write.

That work is necessary, and sometimes even creative, but I wish the industry left artists more space to be attentive. Good art often requires slowness, while the digital world constantly demands proof that you are still visible.

 

If you could change one thing about the music industry, what would it be?

I would change the industry’s tendency to confuse visibility with value. Algorithms are useful tools, but they measure movement and attention more easily than depth, patience, or cultural meaning. An independent work should not become invisible simply because its creators cannot purchase constant exposure or produce content every day.

I would also insist on more accurate recognition of authorship. Singers—especially women—are still frequently presented as the visible face of a project even when they are also writing, arranging, researching, producing, directing, and making central artistic decisions. Being seen is not the same as being credited.

A healthier industry would offer fairer access, transparent compensation, and enough room for artists to develop a body of work rather than continually performing novelty.

 

Name one of your all-time favourite albums?

One of my all-time favourite albums is Band on the Run by Paul McCartney and Wings. I love its sense of movement. It travels through rock, pop, orchestral colour, humour, tension, escape, and tenderness, yet it never feels like a collection of unrelated experiments.

The album is adventurous without trying to announce how adventurous it is. Each change of mood feels like another scene in the same journey. That balance—freedom within coherence—is something I admire deeply.

I am drawn to albums that invite you to inhabit a world from beginning to end. Band on the Run reminds me that artistic identity does not require repeating the same texture; sometimes identity is the imagination that connects all the changes.

 

What’s best? Vinyl, Cassettes, CDs or Downloads?

I grew up with vinyl, cassettes, and CDs, so each format belongs to a different chapter of my life. I have a special affection for cassettes. Listening involved a tiny choreography: choose one, place it in the player, turn it over, rewind it, wait, and occasionally rescue the tape with a pencil.

Physical formats give music weight and temperature. The cover, booklet, photographs, typography, marks of use, and even the imperfections of an old copy become part of the memory of the album. You do not only remember the song; you remember where the object lived in the room.

At the same time, I am grateful for digital music. It allows an independent band from Puebla to reach a listener in another country almost instantly. Digital formats give music distance; physical formats give it touch. I do not want to choose between them—but I will always consider the vintage ones small treasures.

 

What’s the best gig that you have played to date?

One of our most meaningful concerts was the presentation of Circle of Nine at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Cholula during the Day of the Dead festival in 2025.

The pyramid was not simply a dramatic backdrop. We were visitors in a landscape that holds centuries of human presence, transformation, belief, and memory. Around us was a living Mexican tradition dedicated to maintaining a relationship with those who are absent; within our songs were women, legends, and silenced voices struggling not to disappear. The two contexts were different, and we did not want to collapse them into one another, but they resonated through the shared act of remembering.

Performing there made the album’s central questions feel tangible. What do communities preserve? What do they transform? What does it mean to speak a name again after history has changed it?

For a few moments, the music, the place, the audience, and the occasion seemed to listen to one another. That concert remains unforgettable because it reminded us that a stage can sometimes become a point of encounter between the living, the remembered, and the stories still asking to be heard.

 

If you weren’t a musician, what else would you be doing?

I would probably be a stage actress. Theatre has always attracted me because it asks a performer to lend her body, voice, and emotional memory to another life. I took musical-theatre workshops, although I have not yet participated in a full theatrical production because music has repeatedly become the road I chose to follow.

In music, I often begin with my own voice and transform it into a character or narrative. In theatre, I would begin with someone else’s character and search for the part of myself capable of making that life truthful. The direction is different, but the questions are very similar.

Perhaps this is why I do not consider theatre an abandoned path. It is already present in the way I think about movement, interpretation, costume, silence, and storytelling onstage. I still hope that one day the two roads will meet in a production where music and theatre are inseparable.

 

Which five people would you invite to a dinner party?

I would invite Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Federico García Lorca, Béla Bartók, Loreena McKennitt, and Rabindranath Tagore. It would be an extraordinary dinner, although I suspect the conversation would last until breakfast.

Sor Juana would bring the perspective of a woman who defended her intellectual and creative life against structures determined to limit both. I would ask Lorca about the meeting point between poetry, theatre, music, symbolism, and popular tradition—and perhaps persuade him to read aloud after dessert.

Bartók could speak about collecting and studying traditional music while transforming its materials inside a modern compositional language. Loreena McKennitt would offer the experience of a living independent artist who has travelled through history, literature, mythology, and different cultures without losing her own voice. Tagore would expand the table even further: poetry, music, theatre, painting, education, spirituality, and cultural dialogue all existed within his creative life.

The central question would be: how can an artist receive something from a culture without reducing it to an ornament? I would want to hear them discuss preservation and change, translation and ownership, scholarship and intuition. Then I would ask each of them to choose the music for one course of the meal.

 

What’s next for the band?

Our present focus is the continuing life of Circle of Nine. The album is already published, but the cultural conversation around it is still unfolding.

We want to create paths into the music for listeners in different countries: explaining the legends, languages, historical questions, and literary decisions behind particular songs while remaining honest about the difference between documented sources and our artistic interpretation.

We are also revisiting our earlier catalogue. Many songs already contain references to a country, language, historical period, legend, or musical tradition, but those connections have not always been communicated clearly. We want to reveal them through contextual writing, visual material, interviews, translations, and conversations with listeners and cultural voices who can deepen—or challenge—our understanding.

The aim is not to turn every culture into a costume or every country into a marketing label. Culture is not a mood board. We want to approach each source as a living context with its own people, contradictions, and memory.

For Kilometro1, the next stage is therefore musical without necessarily being a new recording: it is the work of listening more carefully, giving our existing songs richer context, and building meaningful relationships with audiences, researchers, cultural spaces, and artists internationally.

 

What Social Media / Website links do you use to get your music out to people?  

Website: kilometro1.com
Spotify: Kilometro1 on Spotify
Circle of Nine: All streaming platforms
Instagram: @lilykerrigan.mx

 

There’s a long-standing food-based debate here in the UK. And we’d like your help. So… A Jaffa cake – is it a cake or a biscuit? Discuss! 

As a Mexican, I know that food questions can create surprisingly serious debates, so I will answer with humility: it is a cake. However, I am willing to conduct further research—preferably with several Jaffa Cakes and a cup of coffee—before publishing my final conclusions.

 

Thank you for your time. Is there anything else that you would like to add?

We would like to thank Beth and Ever Metal for giving us the opportunity to introduce Kilometro1 to their readers. The United Kingdom has consistently been among the countries where our music finds an audience, and that connection is especially meaningful because British culture has given the world such a rich conversation between rock and metal, traditional balladry, Gothic literature, folklore, theatre, and historical storytelling.

Those forms do not treat the past as something silent. A ballad changes as it is sung; a legend survives by acquiring new listeners; Gothic literature allows old fears to enter a different room. That movement between inheritance and reinvention is very close to the way we think about music.

The Age of Kings, from The Final Legend, explores kingdoms, fortresses, battles, inherited legends, and the process by which power becomes history. Circle of Nine approaches cultural memory from another direction, following the Witte Wieven through oral tradition, written accounts, accusation, and modern imagination. In both cases, we are interested not only in what the story says, but in who had the authority to preserve it.

As a Mexican project, we create from a country where many languages, beliefs, histories, and forms of cultural memory coexist. That does not give us ownership of another people’s tradition; it gives us a profound awareness that stories carry responsibilities. When Kilometro1 enters a legend from another culture, we try to enter as guests: we research, distinguish history from interpretation, acknowledge distance, and allow the encounter to change us.

Perhaps that is the deepest meaning of our name. We are travellers. Music allows a Mexican band to meet a Dutch legend, a British reader, a German stage, or a listener whose language we do not yet speak. The meeting does not erase our differences. It gives us a reason to listen across them.

Thank you to everyone who has travelled part of this road with us, and thank you to Ever Metal for helping us open another path.

Disclaimer: This interview is solely the property of Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this interview unless you have the express permission of said party. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.