The Warning’s first-ever shows were electric. They roared onto the stage, plugged in their instruments, and began to play their hearts out. It was a HOT START! The crowd was screaming for more. Pau thrashed at her drums. Dany mastered her combo of riffs. They were STAR POWER READY! Dany tilted her guitar upward and lightning shot out from it. YOU ROCK! When the song ended, Pau put down her sticks, Dany her guitar and the Villarreal sisters turned off the console. The screen went dark, and dinner was ready: “Kids, time to eat.”
Daniela (Dany), Paulina (Pau) and Alejandra (Ale) Villarreal — three sisters who grew up in mountain-fringed Monterrey, Mexico — played the Rock Band video game every single day between school and dinner. “That game gave us our first idea of what a rock star was,” says Dany today from the Warning’s tour bus.
From Rock Band, they also learned a catalog of classic-rock anthems — from Aerosmith to AC/DC and beyond — and forged their dreams around the salvation those riffs seemed to promise. Dany, the oldest, went straight for the guitar. Pau, the middle child, picked up the drumsticks, while Ale, who was then too young to really understand what was going on, danced around them. They were eight, six and three when they first started playing. “The game portrayed these people, these rock stars, as totally free — and free to express themselves,” Dany reflects.
The Warning’s Dany Villarreal Vélez
Steve Thrasher
For so many kids raised in the mid-Aughts, the idea of what constituted a rock star came from that same game. Then, if these kids went on to pick up the actual instruments, they’d soon learn that real guitars cause blisters and calluses. Drums leave splinters. The bass is heavy and requires a lot of patience. What the game also left out was how utterly exhausting it is to be a rock star.
Speaking to Revolver while traveling between a stacked schedule of shows across Europe, the Warning are tired. This isn’t the lifestyle Rock Band promised. It’s actually way better. But, Dany says, “If you want to survive it, you have to be disciplined. It’s how we give our best at every show.”
Now in their early twenties — and over halfway through the busiest year of their career thus far — the Warning are living their Rock Band dreams, with all the hard-worn reality that entails. There are few acts today who really embody what we traditionally think of as a rock star. But the Warning are it — and they’re proudly presenting that reinvigorated rock & roll archetype to a whole new generation of global fans.
Earlier this summer, they released Keep Me Fed, their fourth and hardest studio album to date. The record’s stadium-rock influences — Muse, Royal Blood and Halestorm — embroidered lovingly on its sleeve: from the heavy grooves of the infectious “MORE” to the big riffs and radio-ready hooks of “Hell You Call a Dream” to the anthemic melodies of “S!CK.”
Since then, the Warning have experienced a huge upsurge in interest, demand and popularity. They’ve accrued millions of streams, hundreds of thousands of new followers and fans, and covered the world almost once over while on tour. They’ve been a mainstay on the festival circuit, having played Rocklahoma, Riot Fest and Download. And, for at least the past couple of years, they’ve been the go-to support act for some of rock’s biggest names: Foo Fighters, Muse and Guns N’ Roses, among others. They’ve also earned cosigns from their heroes, including huge support from Metallica on the back of their breakout viral cover of “Enter Sandman.”
Nowadays, the Warning are pretty hard to get a hold of. Revolver caught them briefly right before they hit the stage at the Steelhouse Festival in muddy Wales. Then, we chatted again while they were on the road. We found them totally beat — but in good spirits. “You learn to grab energy from other places, but we are perpetually tired,” says Pau.
This could be the perfect recipe for sororicide: three frazzled sisters cooped up on a bus together — travel-ing, traveling, traveling, no end in sight. But in fact, the Villarreals have never felt closer. “Our relationship as sisters is just great,” says Pau. “And to be growing next to each other as businesswomen, as artists, as creatives, as writers, as musicians — I feel very lucky to see my sisters grow alongside me in the way that we do.”
When the road gets too tough, they lean on this singular bond. “It’s always really comforting to know that as sisters, we go through everything together,” adds Ale. “We went through all of this together.”
And it all began with one slim, rectangular present.
The Warning’s Ale Villarreal Vélez
Medios y Media/Getty Images
Rock Band was a gift from the sisters’ father to Pau for her sixth birthday. It was he who also eventually encouraged them to pick up the real thing. Their father noticed an unusual charisma from Dany when she played guitar and sang into the plastic micro-phone, ditto for Pau, who drummed with a steady control and tempo that seemed to come instinctively.
Shortly after those first Rock Band jams, the two older sisters attended a summer camp and played real musical instruments, at length, for the very first time. When they came home, they each picked up piano lessons and began performing tunes as far-ranging as the Barney & Friends soundtrack to AC/DC numbers.
The sisters were quick learners. They each practiced in isolation, taking up music as a separate vocation. They eventually joined forces the following winter, when the school’s Christmas music festival gave Dany and Pau the idea to play together. After months of rehearsing in separate rooms, they finally shared a space — and they shared their songs. The pair built on one another’s ideas innately, as only sisters can, and soon transformed into a solid musical unit.
Becoming a family band wasn’t part of the plan. These were kids, there was no plan. There were just toys and dinners and games and school and friends. That was life — until music overshadowed it all.
When Ale was old enough to develop enough hand-eye coordination, she joined her older sisters on bass. They practiced every spare moment they had. When one of them fumbled, they communicated calmly and directly. They started over. And over. And over.
They naturally leaned into rock early on, copying the movements they’d seen on the Rock Band game. They covered just about every staple you could think of, then recorded them and uploaded the result to YouTube — sharing the link with only a close pool of friends. There was one cover, in particular, that contained an unusual display of verve and mastery: the trio’s take on Metallica’s “Enter Sandman.”
Not long after uploading the video, in 2014, the view count climbed. These weren’t just their close friends watching. These were hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands of strangers sitting back in awe as three young kids shredded the hell out of a song they’d come to know intimately.
The Villarreal sisters understood the concept of virality, sort of. Each member of the band is a digital native, meaning that they’ve never known life without the internet. They’d seen this sort of thing happen to a bunch of unsuspecting kids. But they never imagined it would happen to them. “We couldn’t fully grasp what going viral meant,” says Pau. “But all those views meant that we started getting attention — and a lot more opportunities and interviews and stuff like that.”
The video reached 20 million views and eventually found its way to Metallica’s Kirk Hammett, who said that the girls kicked “maximum ass.” He later invited them to reprise their cover — with a vocal assist from pop singer Alessia Cara — for 2021’s The Metallica Blacklist, the band’s officially endorsed Black Album cover record. “None of this would have actually happened if it wasn’t for the internet,” says Ale. “The internet can be a double-edged sword — but when used correctly, it can really just make your dreams come true.”
The sisters first caught the world’s attention when they were just 14, 12 and 9 years old. “While people our age were going to school and doing normal things, we were growing up in the spotlight,” says Pau. “And the fun part was that we were doing it together. I feel like maybe if we would have been alone in it, it would have been very different.”
That dream began to kindle right after the viral success of their initial “Enter Sandman” cover. The first step, they decided with their parents, would be to attend a five-week summer course at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston. But that was a lot of dollars, and a lot of miles, away.
As luck would have it, a showrunner from The Ellen DeGeneres Show discovered the sisters’ “Enter Sandman” video and learned of their Berklee goal, which they were trying to achieve via a crowdfunding campaign. The Warning were eventually invited to perform on the show — the hot lights of Hollywood shining on them, their online buzz transforming into real-world energy. The trio heard the audience clapping, and felt the excitement as the cheering escalated during their performance. These were real people watching them. Not just numbers on a screen. With the show’s help (including a $30,000 donation from its sponsors), the sisters met their crowdfunding goals and headed to Berklee.
There, they were encouraged to make the transition from performing covers to writing originals. “It was a challenge set to us by a music professor called Pablo González,” says Dany. “He’s a great bass player. He was like, ‘Hey, why don’t you start writing songs? Let’s just try this out.’”
The sisters took to the challenge like it was another game, just one of their fun activities. Their school music teachers helped them record their early songs. They put them up in a tiny studio — and the girls tracked what would become the Warning’s debut EP, 2015’s Escape the Mind.
“We were so excited to have that experience, we didn’t even know if we would release it,” Dany recalls. “In the end we just thought, Why not?” In a full-circle moment, the makers of Rock Band had learned of the Warning’s early years playing the game, and included the EP’s “Free Falling” in Rock Band 4.
The Warning’s Pau Villarreal Vélez
Medios y Media/Getty Images
The next dream: release their very first album. Still wishing to do everything themselves, they created a GoFundMe campaign to raise funds, and quickly established an intimate rapport with their fans. Before long, they raised $20,630, an amount that would get them into a much more substantial studio with a professional team. “Our parents really helped us with the business side of things,” says Pau. “We were just kids, so we had no idea what was going on.”
They dropped two independently funded and released albums, 2017’s XXI Century Blood and 2018’s Queen of the Murder Scene, before deciding to take things up a notch. By that point, their viral popularity had caught the attention of several different labels. And in 2020, they signed a five-record deal with Universal Music Group’s Lava/Republic Records, making them the first Mexican group to ever do so — in fact, the first Mexican band to ever sign with a major U.S. label imprint.
“We were an independent band for almost seven years, and we wanted to take advantage of any opportunity that would allow us to go [to the next level],” says Pau. With Lava/Republic’s support, the Warning unleashed 2021’s Mayday EP, which was closely followed by the 2022 full-length Error. “We were really lucky to find Lava,” adds Ale. “We always want to go higher and be better — and our label works hard alongside us.”
The signing brought the Warning into closer contact with their heroes. If you were at some of the biggest rock shows in 2022 and 2023, chances are you saw the Warning opening. At the beginning of 2023, they supported Muse, Foo Fighters and Halestorm. “Touring with legends, our biggest idols since we were kids, taught us so much,” says Dany. Soon, they were walking red carpets, becoming a household name on TikTok and turning into a certified act. Their star, very quickly, rose.
September 2023 was a banner month for the band. They performed at the MTV Music Video Awards in New York, before flying to Florida to support Guns N’ Roses. It was the second time they opened for the hard-rock icons, after a surreal 2022 show in the Warning’s home city of Monterrey. “Opening for Guns N’ Roses in our hometown — oh, my God, I can’t believe I just said that, but yes, that happened,” Dany recalls of that first gig. “It was amazing. We had so much fun.”
Time has sped up exponentially for the sisters. The first half of 2024 has been a snowball of tours, events and appearances that’s quickly turning into an avalanche. “We’ve noticed very significant changes,” says Dany, of the amount of attention they’re now receiving, “especially since the new album came out.”
“But more than anything,” adds Pau, “as we start getting these new opportunities at this level, we push each other harder, to go above the level. That’s what we pride ourselves in: being good musicians, giving good performances. So as the stakes are higher and there is more pressure and more eyes watching us, we feel super motivated to be the best we can be.”
Now on EXPERT level, the Warning are ready to take over the entire game.