Received wisdom holds that the post-punk and new wave sounds of the ‘80s boomed at least in part in response to growing political conservatism. While this idea certainly checks out for the UK and U.S. with the rise of Thatcher and Reagan, respectively, La Ola Nocturna: Experimental Songs and Deviant Pop from the Spanish ’80s tells the exact opposite story about what went down in Spain. When three and a half decades of oppression finally came to a close with the death of Francisco Franco in 1975, Spanish society started opening up on multiple fronts. By the ‘80s, a new breed of musicians were busily building their own counterculture, taking cues from British and American synth-pop, no wave, goth, and new wave acts while bringing their own identity to…

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