The last riff of Casino sounded 13 years ago. A band of intense, dark, and direct rock, it stood out in the early 2000s, when the national rock scene moved between the corporate shadow of multinationals and emerging independent bands.
After releasing three albums, the group disbanded. Its singer and guitarist, Pablo Giadach, had become a sought-after producer and set up his own studio, Lautaro, one of the prominent ones in the capital. It was in that network of bands coming and going, when the musician was repeatedly asked the question: when is Casino coming back?
“At one point, a lot of people started talking to us about Casino,” he tells Culto. “There was a lot of interest from people. And I also saw it a lot in the bands that came to record at the studio, who told me that Casino was like a reference or an influence. So, we got excited.”
Thus, at the end of 2025, Giadach, along with Guillermo Drago (bass/backing vocals) and drummer Felipe Bawlitza met precisely at the Lautaro studio. There they connected, and with a pulse of saturated riffs, the music began to flow again. “We got excited and at one point we got together to rehearse,” he recalls. “And it worked. For us, Casino was a very serious thing, we rehearsed all the time, we toured for months, traveled together, everything a band does that is so motivating, so entertaining.”
Everything was facilitated by the fact that the musicians had kept in touch and from time to time, the idea of a reunion arose. “We never had a band drama, just life situations led us to stop playing and we never really stopped seeing each other much,” says Giadach. “And with the Casino guys, we had been talking about getting together to play, just for the desire to get together and play.”
So the group announced a reunion event; Casino will sound again on September 25 at the Bunster room of M100. An event that has been promoted as Casino 21 years, marking the anniversary of their first album released in 2005. But in reality, it is much more. “It’s like paying a kind of tribute to everything we did before,” explains Giadach. “Of course, we called it Casino 21 years, but it’s not like we said: ‘Oh, it’s been 21 years since the album, we have to play it.’ No, it was more like ‘let’s get together to play, see what happens’.”
The show will focus mainly on the group’s first two albums, Casino (2005) and Volcanes (2007), leaving aside the third and last one, Million Days (2011). “That’s because in the last phase of Casino we played the Million Days” a lot, explains Giadach.
That first self-titled Casino album also crossed with Pablo Giadach’s early interest in learning the secrets of recording and music production. In fact, he himself took care of recording. “We recorded the album with very, very limited resources, a very simple interface, an old console,” he explains. “And I was very eager to develop a career as a producer. Since school, I recorded the bands I was in. And with Casino, we recorded rehearsals, composing along with the recording.”
The story of that album intertwined with the debut album of Casanova, Julián Peña’s band, in which Giadach participated in production and as a guest musician. “We did all this roughly at the same time as Casanova’s album, which I was also in charge of producing. So, we were first at Casanova’s drummer’s house, who had a space we had designated as a rehearsal room and studio. And it surprises me that those two albums, Casino’s and Casanova’s, still get a lot of play to this day, time has given them what they deserve.”
That first album also had a promotional boost thanks to the single En tus manos, probably the band’s best-known song, which achieved high radio rotation. There is a story that the riff of the song came to Giadach… in a casino. “I was partying in Mendoza, on a trip with some friends,” he says. “And we went to a casino, it’s not that we like casinos, I find them detestable, but we had gone to a party at this place and the riff came to my head out of nowhere.”
“Then I got to Santiago, started playing it on guitar and of course, then we started playing it in the rehearsal room,” Giadach continues. “There Guille [Drago] threw the idea of the chorus on the bass. The song was made super fast and then I, due to life situations I was going through, wrote the lyrics in 10 minutes, I swear! And that was it. That’s how it was.”
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En tus manos also appeared as the central theme in the film Promedio Rojo (2004), which gave it massive reach. “It was because I distributed demos. I studied audiovisual communication, did some work with Eduardo Bertrán, and at that time we were involved there,” explains the musician.
By then, the trio already had the album ready and was looking for a label to release it. “Now self-management is very common, everyone records themselves, releases themselves, but back then it wasn’t. It was a Myspace era at best. We still followed a kind of old school approach of looking for labels and all that. Actually, we had the album ready, it was going to be released by Warner. In the end, we ended up releasing it through La Oreja because I don’t know what happened with Warner.”
-How have the rehearsals been leading up to the show?
A lot of emotional memory. No one learned the songs at home, listened to the album, no one. It was like “we get together, let’s play.” In fact, sometimes we had to reference, like “let’s listen to the song from the album to see how we did this.” Because after all this time, imagine, you record those albums and then you stop listening to them. You don’t listen to your albums all the time, you’re playing, and the song is finally defined when you play it live, for the musician it’s like that. For people, the song is defined by the album. So we had to do a “wait, but on the album this thing wasn’t like this.” Still, we’ve all stayed in music, so it hasn’t been that hard, really.
-After this show, do you plan to do more performances? Take it to other places in Chile, extend this meeting, eventually a tour…
Look, I think so. The idea has gradually been taking shape, because honestly, we didn’t know how this was going to turn out, like an internal band thing. And the truth is it has worked out and we’re super excited, we really liked playing again, so we probably won’t want this to end on the 25th.
-And what about your other projects? For example, The Cruel Visions, which you had been releasing music for. You do it yourself, having your studio very handy as well…
I have it fully handy, but I think the main motivation is that I can’t stop composing. It’s something that comes with me, it’s a kind of need. I pick up a guitar and immediately something comes to mind. I don’t pick up a guitar to play a Beatles or The Cure song; I pick up a guitar, start playing anything and I’m composing all the time. So obviously the possibility will be very handy, and having the studio there, obviously, very convenient.
-And any chance of recording new music with Casino, any song? Could a riff come out of those rehearsals, especially having your studio…
I think so, and besides, we do have ideas. I have songs that haven’t been for Cruel Visions, there are ideas and the desire seems to be there. What happened is we had to see how this going back to playing together would turn out, build a kind of band routine, which has been very cool, getting together to rehearse two or three times a week. Of course, now we’ve been very focused on rehearsing this show, but we don’t want to stop this so soon, so we’ll probably keep rehearsing. And there, as you say, ideas will come out and who knows. We don’t have any pressure, but that same pressure isn’t a negative either, I mean, something can definitely come out.
Casino will perform on September 25 at the Bunster room of M100 in a show that will have Rodrigo Astaburuaga and Sam Maquieira as guests, renowned guitarists who collaborated with the group at some points in their history. Tickets can be purchased through the Ticketplus system.
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