A Night with The Warning: Breaking Barriers in Music
I walked into The Fonda Theatre in Los Angeles knowing almost nothing about The Warning. I knew their name, and that was basically it. So when three beautiful women walked onto that stage oozing confidence, one of the first things I found myself wondering was how old they were. They looked young, but nothing about the way they performed felt inexperienced.
Their stage presence was something else. They looked comfortable, sounded seasoned, and carried themselves like artists who had been doing this for a very long time. At one point during the show, they mentioned that they had been together for 13 years, and I remember pausing. Thirteen?
The Warning The Fonda Theater Zharmaine Boatman The 824 Journal 13
Who Is The Warning? Three Sisters From Monterrey, Mexico
It did not make sense to me at first because they still looked so young. Then I learned that The Warning is made up of three sisters from Monterrey, Mexico: Daniela “Dany” Villarreal, Paulina “Pau” Villarreal and Alejandra “Ale” Villarreal. They formed the band as children in 2013, which meant that the 13 years they mentioned onstage were very real. Suddenly, what I had watched that night made a lot more sense.
They may still be young women, but they have already spent a huge portion of their lives learning how to do this together. You can see it in the way they move around each other, the way they communicate without seeming to have to think about it, and the way each of them takes up her own space without competing with the other two. Their personalities come through individually, but the three of them still feel like one unit.
What I loved most was that they truly gave the performance everything they had. There was never a moment where it felt like they were simply playing their instruments and getting through a set. They were performing. They looked like they wanted to be there just as much as the people who had waited to see them.
I kept watching Ale in particular and thinking about how effortless she made playing bass look. She was not standing there concentrating on every movement. She was performing while doing it, moving with the music and making something difficult look almost casual. I kept thinking, how is she this good already?
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But then again, she did not start yesterday. None of them did. The sisters began playing music when they were children, and one of the moments that first pushed them in front of an international audience was their cover of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.” Over the years they kept playing, writing, touring, experimenting and growing, even when most of the people in the room with me that night probably had no idea how long that road had already been.
Thirteen years later, I happened to walk into one of their shows without any of that context. Maybe that was actually the best way for me to experience them. I was not waiting for a certain song, I did not already have a favorite sister, and I did not know the history behind their albums. I just watched, and they completely won me over.
They also stopped a few times during the set to talk to the audience. They spoke about bringing a new song from the new album into the show, and at another point told the crowd about a song they especially loved playing. The reaction was immediate. The room erupted before they had even finished explaining themselves, and it was obvious that the people around me knew exactly what they were talking about.
A Crowd That Did Not Fit Any One Generation
A crowd did not fit any single generation. Thus, The Warning band illustrates how people cross generations and resist simple labels.
Part of what surprised me most was the audience itself. I have covered enough concerts now that you can usually get a pretty good sense of who an artist’s core audience is just by looking around the room. I could not do that with The Warning. I saw older men and women, middle-aged fans, people around my age, Gen Z, and at least one kid who looked like he belonged to Gen Alpha.
There was also one guy who kept yelling, “Open up the pit!” throughout the night, as if saying it one more time might finally change everyone’s mind. It did not. That did not stop him from trying again, and again. At some point, I started waiting for it because I knew it was coming, while the rest of the room continued to collectively decline his invitation.
A few feet away from all of that, I was watching another fan experience the night in a completely different way. I was standing off to the side of the theater in this little cutout area, separated from the crowd by a small barricade. Right on the other side of it was a boy who could not have been much older than 12, surrounded almost entirely by adults. That did not stop him from showing exactly how much this music meant to him.
Almost the entire night, he was leaning over that barricade toward the stage, reaching out with his arms and screaming every word back at them. Every time The Warning spoke, he listened. Every time the music started again, he was right back over that barricade, reaching toward them and singing as loudly as he could. I kept looking over at him because he was completely in it.
And I loved that for him. At that age, sometimes you do not even know how to explain everything you are feeling yet, and then you find music that somehow says it for you. You get to stand in a room full of strangers, scream those words as loudly as you want, and for a few hours you have somewhere to put all of that emotion. There was something beautiful about watching him have that.
What made it even more interesting was realizing that he was one of the youngest people there, surrounded by adults who were connecting with the same band in their own way. The words may mean something completely different to him than they do to someone who has already lived another 20, 30 or 40 years, but somehow The Warning is reaching both of them. That says a lot about their music, and it started to answer one of the questions I had been asking myself all night: how does one band reach this many different kinds of people?
Why The Warning’s Songwriting Travels Across Ages
I am an absolute sucker for storytelling through music. I love artists who are intentional enough to put together albums with actual meaning, heart and depth behind them. I do not need every song handed to me with a simple explanation, and I like music that gives you something to sit with after it is over. The more I started looking into The Warning after the show, the more I understood why that audience was so mixed.
Their work has explored apathy, self-sabotage, dehumanization, inner battles, depression, madness and dissociation. Those are not shallow subjects, especially coming from artists who began writing music at such young ages. When you start writing about the parts of the mind that people often struggle to explain out loud, age starts to matter a little less. A 12-year-old may hear one thing in a song while someone in their forties or sixties hears those same words through everything they have already lived through.
That kind of writing can travel. It also says something about Dany, Pau and Ale themselves. To recognize complicated emotions, put them into words and then turn them into something another person can recognize themselves in takes a level of emotional awareness that not everyone has. The fact that they already have that kind of depth in their twenties makes me incredibly curious about what their music will sound like after they have lived even more life.
What happens when these women are 35? Forty? Forty-five? What happens when another decade gives them more heartbreak, more joy, more disappointment, more perspective and more stories to tell? I cannot imagine what they will be, and I mean that in the best possible way.
The Moment That Showed Me What Their Fans Are Made Of
There was another moment that night that told me a lot about The Warning without the band even being in the room. There was supposed to be some sort of meet and greet afterward, and eventually we were told that Dany was not feeling well and would not be coming out. I expected at least a little disappointment because people had waited and naturally thought they were going to receive something at the end of the night. Instead, what I kept hearing was concern.
People said she needed to rest. They hoped she felt better. They talked about the fact that the band still had another show to perform. It was not one small group saying it either; I heard it from different people who did not seem connected to each other at all.
That stayed with me. These were fans who had something they were looking forward to taken off the table, and their first reaction was still, take care of her. Whatever The Warning has done over these 13 years, they have clearly built something with their audience that goes beyond liking the music. There is loyalty there, but there is also genuine affection.
They Converted Me
I understood that a little better by the time I got home. I got home around midnight, and by 12:08 I was already taking notes, writing down thoughts and going through my photos. I do not do that. Normally after a concert I have been carrying cameras and standing for hours, so I need to back everything up and decompress before I can even think about writing.
That night, I needed to write. I had too many thoughts running through my head, and I knew I was going to forget something if I did not start getting them out immediately. Even during the show, I was already texting people. I sent a clip to my husband and five of my closest friends and told them, “These girls are phenomenal. They are amazing.”
Every single one of them responded. They wanted to know who the band was and where they were from, and these are elder millennials who had not really known The Warning either. In one night, six more people knew who they were simply because I could not keep my mouth shut about what I had just seen. I do not doubt that at least some of them started digging through the band’s music afterward, just like I did.
That is what The Warning did to me. I did not listen to a lot of rock, and I am not someone who walked into that venue already knowledgeable about the genre or the band. They made me want to learn. They made me want to watch old videos, understand how three little girls from Monterrey became the women I had just watched command that stage, and talk to longtime fans about what they had seen happen over these 13 years.
They converted me.
Truthfully, I rarely buy concert merch either. That night, I wanted a shirt. Of course, I made the rookie mistake of waiting until the end of the night, and by then the shirts I wanted were gone. I was actually irritated with myself because had I known what I was walking into, I would have bought one before the show.
And this is going to sound ridiculous, but I wanted that shirt because I wanted to wear it somewhere and have somebody recognize it. Like, yeah, I know about this band too. Look how cool I am. That is not normally me, but something about discovering The Warning made me want to be part of it.
“Kerosene,” Everything’s Falling and the Billboard Firsts
Then I started looking at what had been happening around them outside of the room I had just been standing in, and I realized that saying they were skyrocketing was not really an exaggeration. “Kerosene” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart, making The Warning the first Mexican band and the first all-women band to lead the chart in its 45-year history. One song broke two barriers at the same time.
And that was not the only first happening around them. Their new album, Everything’s Falling, debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Hard Rock Albums chart, making them the first Mexican band to lead that chart and only the second all-women act to do it, following BABYMETAL. The same album debuted at No. 17 on the all-genre Billboard 200. For a band that spent years building itself long before most Americans knew its name, those numbers suddenly put the scale of what is happening into perspective.
That is when those 13 years started hitting me differently. We see the No. 1 now. We see the records being broken, the rooms full of people and the fans who already know every word, but we do not see the years before that nearly as easily. There were years when they were still children learning their instruments, years of figuring out who they wanted to be as artists, songs that worked, things that probably did not, and all of the growing that had to happen before their names could ever be attached to a sentence that begins with “the first.”
They had to keep choosing this before there was proof that it would become this. Maybe that is the part I admire most. They gave themselves enough time to become this good, and they kept going long enough for the rest of the world to start catching up.
What I Want My Daughters to See in The Warning
Maybe that is also why I keep thinking about introducing my own girls to their music. Not because I expect them to suddenly become rock fans, but because there is something I want them to see in these women. They started when they were children, kept going through the awkward years, the growing years and the years before most people knew their names, and now, 13 years later, they are making history. I want my girls to understand that part too.
Sometimes the thing you love does not reward you immediately. Sometimes you have to become good at it quietly first. You have to try things, fail, change, learn and keep going long enough to find out what you are actually capable of. There is something incredibly hopeful about watching three women stand on the other side of all those years and realize that they are still nowhere near done.
There was one last thing I noticed when I started looking through my photographs. Behind them onstage was this huge THE WARNING graphic, with three bright stars worked into the design. I do not know what those stars officially mean to them, if anything, but I know exactly what I saw: those three stars was standing in front of me at that very moment.
I also do not know what they originally intended when they chose the name The Warning. I am not trying to rewrite the meaning of their own name for them. But after seeing them perform, it means something completely different to me now. It feels almost like a statement: this is the warning of what is still to come.
Because somehow, after already doing this for 13 years, they still feel like they are only beginning. I cannot imagine what Dany, Pau and Ale will be at 30, 35 or 40. I cannot imagine what another decade of life will give them to write about or what another decade of playing together will sound like. I just know I want to see it.
I walked into The Fonda knowing almost nothing about The Warning. I walked out texting people about them before I had even gotten home, regretting the shirt I did not buy, thinking about introducing their music to my daughters and wondering when I would get the chance to see them again. So if you have somehow missed them too, consider this your warning.
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