From Buenos Aires to the world
Pacifica is an Argentine rock duo made up of Inés Adam, on guitar and vocals, and Martina Nintzel, on bass and vocals. Their story begins in January 2021 around a shared love of The Strokes, though nothing then suggested these two musicians would build an international career.
A cover posted online, a meeting engineered by a stranger, a first show in a Buenos Aires bar. Then a trip to New York to see The Strokes — a concert that never happens —, a few shows played there and an unexpected offer from the music industry. From their first YouTube covers to Freak Scene, and then to In Your Face!, they will have learned the job in public: writing, recording, playing live.
It is, above all, the story of a friendship that formed at the same time as a band.
The beginnings: two musicians brought together by The Strokes
Inés and Martina meet online in January 2021. Martina runs a Strokes fan account on Instagram, @thestrokesvids, where she shares a cover of Inés's; Inés has been posting videos on YouTube for years and follows her back. A mutual follower suggests they meet, on the grounds that they like the same band and are both Argentine. They never found out who he was: the message came through a question sticker on a story, and the question has since vanished. "I hope it turns up again one day," says Inés.
Talking, they discover they live twenty minutes apart. She isn't sure they would have met in any other context, Martina will say — she doesn't think they would have. They meet at Inés's place and record a cover of "12:51" — the same day they see each other for the first time. Filming on the balcony is no aesthetic choice: it is far too hot to turn off the fan during the take. And yet it is the comments about the balcony that pour in under the video, and there they see an idea — every cover after that will be filmed somewhere else, in a bathroom for "Meet Me In The Bathroom", on a rooftop as a nod to the Beatles for "Girl", in a moving car for Tom Misch's "Movie".
The first exchanges are still awkward. "We were so socially awkward with each other, but musically, we connected instantly." They will also have to deny three things on a regular basis: they are not sisters, they are not dating, and they have not known each other all their lives.
Nor do they come from the same place. Inés has played guitar since childhood — "since I was 12 years old" — and has always sung. Martina, born in Mexico where her parents were working at the time, was a listener first: her father showed her the Beatles and Pink Floyd, her mother Shakira. She picks up the bass at fifteen, almost out of spite. A boy she was seeing had just told her she had no interests of her own; she signed up for bass lessons, she says, to become more interesting. She learned nothing else: "no scales, only Strokes — just full tabs."
From "Strokes girls" to Pacifica
Inés and Martina see little of each other in the months that follow — twice early in the year, and then another covid wave interrupts. Not until November 2021 do they go out together as friends, to a show Martina had been invited to and brings Inés along. That same night, Monopolio, an Argentine Arctic Monkeys covers band, asks them to open one of their shows.
Everything fits into that one evening: their first night out as friends, the decision to start a band, their first concert — and, straight after, the New York idea, which Martina throws in.
They rehearse for two weeks, in the gaps between their schedules — Martina is finishing school, Inés has a job. "I would start school at 5 pm and she would finish working at 2 pm," Martina says, "so I would go over to her house at like 2 pm and then leave." A name is still missing. They want nothing derived from The Strokes — Monopolio owes its own to the Arctic Monkeys — and no chance of ending up as "Strokes girls". They want something feminine, something short, and if possible an esdrújula — a word stressed on the third-to-last syllable. "Buena", after the Morphine song, is dropped. Then "Martina looked up at my guitar": Inés is playing her Yamaha Pacifica, her first electric, the one her brother handed down to her. The very first story on their new account reads, not without humour: "we're Pacifica (for now)".
The first show takes place in December 2021, at El Emergente. They already play two songs of their own, written for the occasion.
New York: the trip that changes everything
The idea comes from Martina. The Strokes are playing New York on New Year's Eve 2021 and she wants to be there, with no way of paying for the trip. "Are you down to go broke and go to New York?" Inés says no — "I have a job, I have a life, I cannot just go to New York City right now" — but adds that if the tickets came free, maybe. "I thought, okay, that's not a no. That's not a no."
Martina had posted a story: if someone invites her to New York, she'll give them her soul. Someone answers — Parkside Patrick, who follows both her fan account and Inés's. He can't put them up, but he has two tickets for the show. For the flights they ask on another story, on the donation platform Cafecito, and people pay. "So if you bought a coffee or a beer for us, thank you so much." Inés's cousin Phil lives in New York and will be away those days: he lends them his flat.
The Strokes show is cancelled, though, before they even board the plane. "We don't even know each other and we're going on this trip and the show got canceled — the one thing we had in common." They go anyway, and will spend New Year's Eve — the night of the cancelled concert — writing.
The Bitter End
The city is still living under covid and, for the first two weeks, nothing is possible. They settle in, share a bed, fill the silences as best they can. "It was like just laying down staring at the ceiling." Then the idea of playing comes to them. Phil, who has a band, knows a venue: he gets them a show at the Bitter End, on Bleecker Street.
The conditions are rudimentary. They rehearse in Phil's living room on a ten-dollar amp — "no pedals, no sound experience, no drummer, no metronome, no talent." Sure nobody will come, they make it a free show. More than sixty people turn up.
It is the second concert of Martina's life. For Inés, the room weighs heavy: Joni Mitchell played there. "I was already shitting my pants," she will say. Martina, for once, is the calm one: "we had nothing to lose because we had nothing to gain."
The stay, planned for a fortnight, will last six weeks. And New York holds more than a run of shows.
From New York to TAG Music
A few days before the Bitter End show, a message arrives from a certain Gabe Saporta. "Yo, what's up, I heard you're playing a show in New York City." He introduces himself as a Uruguayan based in LA, and says he'll send scouts. Inés thinks it's fake; Martina refuses to believe it to the last. Saporta, formerly of Cobra Starship, runs Tag Music, a label born of a joint venture with Atlantic Records.
The manager of the Bitter End calls them back to invite them to return. They can't: they're leaving the following week. But a snowstorm cancels their flight, they stay seven more days and take the chance to play again — at the Bitter End first, then at Arlene's Grocery. At that third show they find themselves running out of breath without understanding why; they will learn afterwards that they had covid. Inés and Martina spend the end of the trip at a fan's place, Taylor's.
Back in Buenos Aires, the meetings with the label follow one another. They have three or four songs. Martina is due to start biology, Inés is working. "If you study, I'm going to work," Inés tells her. Then: if one studies and the other works, they will never have the time. The conclusion is plain: "if we're going to do this, we have to give everything up." Inés quits her job, Martina doesn't enrol, and they sign.
"We were friendly but not friends," Martina will sum up in the British magazine TNAM. "We were presented with the option to sign, and we were like, should we sign or not sign? It was a bit of a risk since we didn't know each other, and we'd only written three songs. But we said: how can we not do this? We signed and became friends making the album."
Julian Casablancas
One episode comes back in several of their interviews without a single article reporting it: it rests on their account alone. They say Julian Casablancas, the singer of The Strokes, writes to them during the New York stay — he can't believe they're playing in New York — after seeing their cover of "Selfless". And that this cover is what decided the band to play the song live at last: he hadn't felt they could do it on stage, she says, until he saw the two of them do it.
The second episode starts with an accident. On her fan account, Martina had posted a version of "Razorblade" whose drums dragged enough to sound like cumbia. She asks him whether it was deliberate; he answers that it wasn't — but that they could do it. They did: live, the song opens in its original version and switches to cumbia halfway through.
They will run into him again by chance, they also say, in a Los Angeles diner where they had just landed. They play him some demos: he rules one out, approves others.
Freak Scene: from covers to songs of their own
They give themselves a year to write, record and produce a record, and the plan is deliberate: twelve months of posting covers, treated as a job, long enough to build an audience that will then listen to their own songs. "We had the attention before we had music of our own," Inés will admit.
Out of those months comes Not a Cover Band, released on 9 December 2022: covers taken from their YouTube channel — The Strokes, Arctic Monkeys, Wet Leg, Los Abuelos de la Nada — and one original, "Drummer Boy". The title already says what is coming.
Moving from covers to compositions is another matter. "A pretty hard adjustment," Inés will say, "simply because we were still getting to know each other and we had to be vulnerable and do something that is very vulnerable, which is writing a song." They had also been warned that covers were a curse — that they would stay stuck with the image of a covers band and never have an identity of their own. At their first show, opening for Monopolio, they had been introduced as "Strokes girls". It is precisely what they did not want to become.
Except that the opposite happened. "When you make covers and put out your own music, usually people tell you to go back to doing covers," Martina will say. "For us, we were doing covers and people wanted to hear our stuff, and we couldn't let that moment slide. And we didn't."
The first singles
"With Or Without You" comes out on 6 April 2023. The song is about exactly that: starting the project without anyone around quite understanding the idea. The video shows them crossing Buenos Aires in a motorhome, picking up various characters — all of them, in fact, people who worked on the record, from the producer to the camerawoman.
Then comes "Anita", whose video the American magazine NYLON premieres in late May. The song grows out of a drum loop, a Weezer meme and a rhyme. "What we wanted most was for anyone called Anita to feel the song was theirs," Inés will say.
The album
Freak Scene is released on 29 September 2023. Eleven tracks, recorded at Estudio NAT in Buenos Aires, with Nicolás De Sanctis — of Indios — producing and on guitar, Fede Pellegrini on drums and Javier Kalwill engineering. They wrote on guitar, bass and a computer, in Inés's flat; only when it came to adding drums did they look for help. The album title comes from a line in "Silent Affection", the song that closes it.
One track nearly didn't make it. "Misled" had been set aside; the producer finds it in a folder of old demos and fights for it to be recorded. It will be cut in one go — a single take, vocals included, on the same microphone.
"On our first album we wanted to be The Strokes," Inés will admit. So, "if in doubt, we took the Strokes route."
Learning to be a live band
A paradox comes with the release of Freak Scene: the duo has an album but barely knows the stage. The record was in fact written and recorded before Pacifica became a real live band. "We wrote the first album without having played a single show as a band," Inés will explain. "Starting to play changed how we saw the songs we'd already written, and the ones we'd write afterwards. We saw them in action, in the flesh."
Putting it into practice is brutal. On 15 October 2023 they present the record at Niceto Club in Buenos Aires, to eight hundred people. A fortnight later, on 29 October, they open for Måneskin: they find out a week beforehand, and go up to sixteen thousand. "It was the biggest crowd we played," Martina will say, "but there were ads in the arena, and I would just be playing and see McDonald's." On 26 November they play Primavera Sound.
Europe
Two days later, on 28 November, they fly to Europe. The tour has been announced since September: six club shows, in Paris, London, Berlin, Manchester, Madrid and Barcelona, with Rodrigo Sarabia on guitar and Andy on drums. Paris is played in a small room, free entry. On 18 December, in a dressing room at Manchester's Deaf Institute, Martina does the maths for TNAM: "this is the eighth time we've played live ever." And she adds what she has drawn from it — "the more we play, the more we rehearse and connect, the better it gets."
2024, a year to breathe
The following year gives them some room. In March they play Lollapalooza Argentina and release Freak Scene: NAK Sessions, three album tracks in acoustic form. In September comes Freak Scene (live) — six songs and a cover of a-ha's "Take On Me", recorded on the roof of the space where they used to rehearse. "The tour changed everything for us," they will say. "We had to learn how to play shows, and we fell in love with the energy you share on stage."
The music of Pacifica
Two voices, a guitar, a bass. The format hasn't changed since the balcony covers, though a guitarist and a drummer have backed them live since 2023.
They enjoy defining themselves, and never twice the same way. "Like a 2000s girlband with a nineties attitude in 2023," Inés offers. Martina puts it shorter: "We're like The Strokes but with the attitude of the Spice Girls." And when the Argentine scene sticks the post-punk label on them, she corrects it: "More than post-punk, we're pop, rock or garage."
Their method, by contrast, doesn't vary. "We like to focus on melody first," they say. "We tend to love a hooky, jumpy melody that sticks around in your brain. Then we find the story that we want to tell, and ultimately that's what makes it Pacifica."
What does it actually sound like? Short songs — thirteen tracks in thirty-six minutes on the second album — built around a chorus you keep after one listen. Two guitars that harmonise rather than answer each other: that is what first caught Inés in The Strokes, guitars as melodic as the voice itself. A bass that follows its own line instead of doubling the pulse — Martina names Carol Kaye, Jaco Pastorius, Pedro Aznar, Kevin Parker. And two voices, almost always together.
The British side
The Strokes remain the matrix. But the British lineage runs deeper. Arctic Monkeys first, whom they have listened to since their teens and name as their greatest influence when writing, then Blur, Pulp, Oasis. Invited by the British Council to talk about their English roots, they stop at "Song 2" — for the humour, and for the irony with which the song mocks American bands. "We do something similar in songs like 'Anita'. We love humour in music."
The Argentine side
The other side is heard less because it isn't in the melodies. "There's such a strong rock culture in Argentina that never goes away," Inés explains — "it's the same three or four historic artists everyone listens to, so it's kind of inescapable." Those artists have names. Asked about her favourite bass lines, Martina picks two Charly García songs; Inés, on guitar solos, chooses "El Enemigo" by Luis Alberto Spinetta. On Freak Scene, a bass line comes from Sui Generis. And when they are asked for their Argentine rock icon, the answer is immediate, and contemporary: "Marilina Bertoldi, no doubt."
They refuse, on the other hand, the role of guardians of the national rock: in Buenos Aires, they say, people never stopped listening to rock, and there is nothing to claim in that.
Women who play
A third thread runs through their references. Inés names The Warning, Haim, Hinds. She says she liked that the first were Mexican and wrote in English: it showed her it was possible, since girls were already doing it. She also mentions St. Vincent, from whom she had kept a video about her guitar technique — they will share a stage with her a few years later, and "actually copied some tech stuff from her" — and Sonic Youth, discovered around fourteen. It isn't a pose: they wanted an all-female technical crew on stage, and couldn't get one.
Why English
The question comes up everywhere: why does an Argentine band write in English? The truest answer is also the simplest, and it comes from New York. "We became friends in New York City, even though we met in Argentina," Inés says. "When we became actual friends we were in New York, and we would communicate in English."
Added to that is a working reason — "we just want to reach as many people as we can in every part of the world" — and one Inés puts well: writing in another language lets you step back a little from what you are writing, and set a small transparent screen in front of it. They translate everything anyway, for fun, into Spanish and French. Versions exist of every song on the second album, made for lyric videos and never released. Only one came out: "Soltame!".
In Your Face!: a more direct kind of writing
With In Your Face!, Inés and Martina come at writing differently. The second album takes two years, where the first had taken one. They begin in Los Angeles, looking for a producer they will end up finding in the UK. The stay gives them something new: writing with strangers. "You introduce yourself to someone for the first time and within minutes you are already writing a song together," they will say. "Some sessions went really badly, others went surprisingly well." "Indie Boyz" is born there, written and produced with Sean Silverman in his studio, coming out of a stretch when they were going out every night — something, they say, that isn't like them.
The album is recorded in England, in three weeks. The result strikes them as too pop; they go back over it to put the rock back in, at the cost of friction with the label. "It was a drama with the record company," Inés will say — and draws a conclusion about the job from it: "sometimes the difference between putting out something you really like and not is having the time and the budget to redo it." The record is finished in Argentina with Javier Kalwill, their sound engineer since 2023, who will follow them to Spain afterwards. Of forty-three songs written, thirteen remain.
Three songs, three stories
"Let Me Have This" is the first song written for the album and the oldest. "We played it many times before we even had a full demo, and it went through a lot of transformations both sonically and lyrically. It used to be much darker." They keep trying until they realise they have another song in the same key with verses they like — "Dylan". "We used the chorus of 'Let Me Have This' and the verses from the other song, and that is how it finally came together." Fans who knew the live version don't recognise the one on the record.
"Wasted a Drunk", the other way round, nearly never existed: "when we went in to produce the record, it was not even on the list of songs we intended to work on."
Then comes "Soltame!", their first song sung in Spanish — the version of "Just No Fun". They write it at a bus stop in England, on the way to the studio, to kill time and for a laugh. The words come out in one go.
The record
In Your Face! is released on 31 October 2025: thirteen tracks, thirty-six minutes. The sound is cleaner than Freak Scene's. "The vocals are more upfront, and the guitars are way less distorted," they will say. "Having the vocals right at the front was intentional so we could say more and be more direct."
The writing, above all, has changed in kind. Where the first album invented characters or reworked situations borrowed from others, this one speaks only of them. "We were trying not to hide," they explain. "Lyrically, it came down to being brutally honest and relying less on metaphors. If we wanted to say something, we just said it, even if it was a little harsh or didn't make us look the best."
Autumn 2025: a setback, a peak, a departure
The year hasn't been easy, and they don't hide it. A tour falls through because the records don't arrive in time. What they hold on to, all year, is Japan — prepared since March, and for a long time the only certainty on the calendar.
The next setback comes from the paperwork. The American tour planned for the autumn, opening for Balu Brigada, never happens: "we had problems with the visa, it kept being delayed and delayed, and by the day they gave it to us it was too late." They still go to the United States, once the shows are gone, to record. "It was pretty hard," Inés will say — though the empty weeks let them rehearse. "It ended up being a good thing."
The empty month serves something else. On 14 November, World Diabetes Day, they set up a fundraiser for the Breakthrough T1D foundation. The idea comes from Martina, who has lived with type 1 diabetes since she was three: as a child she saw balloon releases and events for the day, which eventually stopped. "Why don't we do something?" YouTube lets you join an existing fundraiser without ever touching the money; they record a live session of "What You Doing" for the occasion.
She talks about it as a matter of visibility too. At fifteen she took off her medical devices so her schoolmates wouldn't see them. She started wearing them again, posted a video, and people now come to show her their sensors after shows.
Then everything turns the other way. On 30 November they present In Your Face! at the Teatro Vorterix in Buenos Aires — their first Vorterix, and the biggest headline show they have played. The following Tuesday, they move to Spain.
They had wanted to leave since they met. New York, the city of their dreams, is ruled out given the situation in the United States; England by Brexit. "Why don't we do something that's actually possible?" It will be Madrid, within reach of the European festivals. Their identity, though, stays Argentine.
Japan is left, and it will have been worth the wait. Pacifica's international growth has never followed the usual path, and this is the best example: messages from Japanese fans arrive in numbers, so rather than wait, they open a form to collect the addresses of everyone who wants to see them, and take the list to a local promoter. He gives them one show; the tickets sell out in a day. He adds two more. In December they play two nights in Tokyo and one in Osaka; Martina sings a song in Japanese.
2026-2027: what comes next
2026 is a touring year: sixteen countries, thirty-nine shows, from Mexico — where they play Tecate Pa'l Norte — to Spain, by way of Italy, Germany and the UK. The first is on 26 March; the last of the year, on 19 December, brings them back to Buenos Aires, to Groove, in Palermo.
Something has turned over along the way. Where Monopolio once invited them to open one of its shows, it is now them looking for local bands to open theirs — found city by city, on Instagram, exactly as they had been.
Then comes a date of another order. On 25 February 2027, Pacifica will open for the Foo Fighters at the Estadio River Plate in Buenos Aires. A little over three years earlier, in a Manchester dressing room, they counted eight shows. Five years before that again, they were rehearsing in a New York living room on a ten-dollar amp, sure nobody would come.
A friendship turned into a creative force
Their relationship was built at the same time as their musical education, and you can hear it on the records: the first tells stories about characters, the second tells theirs.
None of it followed a career plan. A meeting online, a cover, a show, a trip that might never have happened, a cancelled concert, a snowstorm, encounters at the right moment. At every step, the story could have gone another way.
From "Pacifica (for now)" to a stadium stage in Buenos Aires, the distance is considerable — and the "for now" has become permanent.
Timeline
January 2021
Inés Adam and Martina Nintzel meet online, over The Strokes
November 2021
The name is chosen, first rehearsals
December 2021
First show, at El Emergente, Buenos Aires
Late 2021 – January 2022
New York trip: The Strokes show cancelled, then three shows, at the Bitter End and Arlene's Grocery
9 December 2022
Not a Cover Band
6 April 2023
First single, "With Or Without You"
29 September 2023
Freak Scene
October-November 2023
Niceto Club (15 Oct.), opening for Måneskin (29 Oct.), Primavera Sound (26 Nov.)
December 2023
First European tour, six shows
March 2024
Lollapalooza Argentina · Freak Scene: NAK Sessions
September 2024
Freak Scene (live)
31 October 2025
In Your Face!
30 November 2025
Album launch at Teatro Vorterix, Buenos Aires
December 2025
Move to Spain · Three sold-out shows in Japan
March 2026
World tour begins: 16 countries, 39 shows
19 December 2026
Buenos Aires, Groove
25 February 2027
Opening for the Foo Fighters, Estadio River Plate
Discography
Not a Cover Band — 2022
Covers from their YouTube channel and a first original track. The record that marks the transition from covers band to the project ahead.
Freak Scene — 2023
First studio album. Eleven tracks recorded in Buenos Aires.
Freak Scene: NAK Sessions — 2024
Three album tracks in acoustic form.
Freak Scene (live) — 2024
Six songs and a cover of "Take On Me", recorded on the roof of their rehearsal space.
In Your Face! — 2025
Second album. Thirteen tracks, a more direct and more personal kind of writing.
Sources
This biography draws on the interviews and articles below, all available in the Transmission section.
Alongside the press are six video interviews, two of them published by the band themselves.
This biography is offered as part of an independent fan page, with no affiliation to the band, its management or its label.
