Chicano Batman

The fifth album from Chicano Batman, Notebook Fantasy takes its title from a phenomenon likely familiar to anyone who feels outside the status quo: the act of spending your formative years dreaming up other worlds and realities in the pages of a notebook, exploring those possibilities with a bold and wide-eyed freedom. Throughout the lifespan of the Los Angeles-bred band, vocalist/lyricist Bardo, guitarist Carlos Arévalo, and bassist Eduardo Arenas have followed their own visionary impulses to tremendous heights—a journey that began with taking the stage at local dive bars and recently saw them co-headlining the legendary Hollywood Bowl. In the making of Notebook Fantasy, Chicano Batman doubled down on their hyper-creative tendencies, discovering new dimensions of their prismatic musicality while infusing their lyrics with an unflinching honesty. With its dizzying constellation of song forms and sounds—including everything from arena-ready anthems to piano-driven balladry to psychedelic space odysseys—the result is a body of work that sheds all inhibitions and fully reveals the sublime expanse of their musical imagination.

Produced by John Congleton (St. Vincent, Erykah Badu) and partly recorded at the historic Sunset Sound, Notebook Fantasy veers away from the subtler sensibilities of 2020’s Invisible People and embraces a sonic approach Arenas refers to as “painting in primary colors.” “We wanted to peel back all the fuzziness and compression, and create something big and punchy and clear that would still hold up if you stripped it down to just a vocal and one instrument,” says Arévalo. “Over the years we’ve all gotten better at executing a vision; we understand how to use our musicianship and instrumentation and energy more deliberately so we can make the music we want to hear, and we’re open to working with other people to make that happen,” adds Bardo. To that end, Chicano Batman enlisted more than a dozen guest musicians on Notebook Fantasy, such as esteemed string arranger Jherek Bischoff (Angel Olsen, Regina Spektor). “Playing with all those seasoned musicians really helped us to level up, and when I listen now there’s so many cool moments within the songs—to me it’s one of those records you can keep going back to and hear something you never noticed before,” says Arévalo. “In a lot of ways this album is us realizing our potential, and getting to that point meant we all had to trust each other and let each other do our thing.” 

As the band explains, building that trust and receptivity required a total overhaul of their musical process. “In the past we’d butt heads trying to filter each song through our individual style or aesthetic—there was a lot of, ‘You brought this song in, but I’m now going to do my thing on it,’” says Arévalo. “This time we allowed whoever started the track to direct the process, and the rest of us were there to bring their vision to life in the way that best served the song.” Their most truly collaborative work yet, Notebook Fantasy wholly reflects all the joy and pain and much-needed catharsis that went into its creation. “My feeling is that if we’re having fun making a song, the audience will pick up on that and have fun too,” says Arenas. “But before we could have fun we had to let go of a lot of old resentments and have some difficult conversations.” 

The first duet in Chicano Batman history, a standout track called “Parallels” arose from a series of writing sessions where Bardo and Arenas worked out those grievances in real time. “Eduardo would come over to my house and we’d talk for hours about all our misgivings, all the stuff we’ve been holding onto from the past, and then we’d put it all into the lyrics,” Bardo recalls. “It was this crazy back-and-forth where we were completely scathing with each other, and it turned out to be kind of revolutionary for us.” “I remember pacing around at Bardo’s place, coming up with lyrics and telling him, ‘Just go for it, man—hit me where it hurts,’” Arenas continues. “And some of those lines did hurt, but we needed them to. That’s the depths we had to go to for this record.” Initially sparked from a voice memo recorded by Arenas on his three-year-old son’s detuned guitar, “Parallels” eventually morphed into a shapeshifting epic graced with cinematic strings, choir-like harmonies, and a bit of gorgeously sprawling guitar improvisation from Arévalo—a glowing example of Chicano Batman’s newly heightened mastery of their songwriting and sound.

All throughout Notebook Fantasy, Chicano Batman channel moments of lightning-in-a-bottle inspiration into songs that push into fantastically strange terrain yet remain rooted in raw emotion. Born from a chord progression composed by Arévalo while practicing guitar and bolstered by lyrics and vocals from Bardo, the album-opening “Live Today” emerges as an empowered meditation on cutting through the chaos and finding your own version of peace, building a gloriously bombastic mood with its slinky grooves and otherworldly synth.  One of the album’s most purely euphoric tracks, “Fly” begins with a guitar hook by Arévalo that was developed during a session revisiting music he began on a Prophet 6 synthesizer. The finished version swells into a lovestruck reverie lit up in gauzy textures and heavenly group vocals. And on “Era Primavera,” Chicano Batman share a symphonic love song inspired by Bardo’s fascination with mid-century Spanish-language ballads, adorning the track with a swooning string section and soaring background harmonies supplied by Martha González of the influential Chicano rock group Quetzal with her son and two of his cousins, transforming “Era Primavera” into a multigenerational family affair with an indelibly poignant impact. “I wrote that song thinking about a past relationship, and about all those romantic ballads that I heard growing up because of my parents,” says Bardo. “It’s the music we all loved together, and I still feel very emotionally connected to it now.”

Another song closely informed by Bardo’s upbringing, “Lei Lá” began as a cumbia experiment played in reverse on a Tascam 244 four-track tape machine in Arenas’ basement. Later, at Sunset Sound, the band achieved a potent synergy by feverishly blending elements of cumbia and dancehall and ’70s-era Nigerian funk, while Bardo delved deep into his Afro-Colombian roots and brought a distinctly sensual, spiritual, and jovial ethos to the track’s lyrical component. A full-tilt dance party in song form, “Lei Lá” reaches a mind-bending ecstasy in its final moments, happily falling out of rhythm and landing in its own enchanted universe. “My mom’s from Cartagena and she’s 63-year-old now, but she dances with this incredible energy like you’ve never seen before—she’s a live wire,” says Bardo. “With ‘Lei Lá’ I was thinking about being onstage and bringing that same energy, so that everyone can feel the electricity.”

Thanks in part to a live show that routinely leaves audiences elated and spellbound, Chicano Batman have experienced a major growth in their fanbase since the release of Invisible People. With their latest triumphs including a headlining spot at L.A.’s iconic Forum in summer 2024, the band’s massive appeal has much to do with a rare balance of boundless charisma and hard-won understanding of the nuances of showmanship. “I remember playing to about 10 people at a bar on a Monday night when we first started out, but we just kept working and growing everything from the ground up,” says Arévalo, who joined Chicano Batman in 2011 after Bardo and Arenas co-founded the band in 2008. “Now we’re at the point where we can look out at the audience at the Hollywood Bowl and see people who’ve been fans for 15 years, and they’re there with their kids who are fans now too. It’s become a generational thing, which feels really magical.” 

For Chicano Batman, the live set served as an essential touchstone throughout the making of Notebook Fantasy. “I always want everyone to scream their hearts out at our shows, so one of the main ideas behind this record was, ‘Let’s write songs that speak about love and pain in a very direct way that you can immediately feel in your soul,’” says Bardo. When matched with their refusal to dilute the diversity and magnitude of their sound, that approach ultimately led the band toward the truest expression of their one-of-a-kind voice. “Making this album allowed us to stop reaching toward anything besides being completely ourselves,” Arenas says. “We believe we have something unique to speak to the world, so we focused on getting that across with confidence and conviction instead of worrying about any outside noise. We want to be so untouchable that no one can take our shine away, and hopefully that’ll help other people to shine too.”

With Mexican and Salvadoran roots in the San Gabriel Valley, east of Los Angeles, Angelica Garcia has spent the last few years creating a new, second family for herself within the welcoming community of Richmond, VA. This multicultural dichotomy shapes her new album Cha Cha Palace—her Spacebomb Records debut and follow up to 2016’s Medicine for Birds. The album finds Garcia confidently assembling a “mental scrapbook” of her journey for listeners, and for herself, all the while confronting a lifetime of feeling split between two identities. “I grew up feeling embarrassed of my culture because it often made me feel like I stuck out in school. My dad would pick me up sometimes blasting Mexican banda music. My own lunch would embarrass me,” she explains. “When I got older I realized that these things are all a part of my identity and I should be proud of them. The things that felt like they were holding me back from being ‘a normal American kid’ are actually my power.”

The message of first single “Jícama” spans generations and is one that resonates deeply for Garcia, who sings/shouts: “I see you, but you don’t see me Jímaca, Jímaca, Guava Tree…I’ve been trying to tell ya, but you just don’t see, like you I was born in this country.” Garcia speaks the reality for millions of Americans unapologetically and with passion. She recalls the first time she performed it live in Los Angeles, “I remember looking out into the crowd—and in front of me were all these young Latinx kids, singing back, every word, even though it was a song I had never played live, or released—and I had the epiphany: ‘This is exactly who I wrote this song for, anyone who feels like they are in-between two identities and their heart is in two places.’”

Growing up in a musical and multigenerational home, Garcia recalls Mexican ranchera music always playing throughout her childhood (her grandmother, uncle, and aunt all were raised singing traditional Mexican music). Garcia’s mother (a professional singer of mostly mariachi and Latin pop) and family always encouraged her musical talents and interests; her stepdad introduced her to classics that quickly became personal favorites, including Neil Young whom she credits as her “first introduction to the expansiveness of rock music.” While attending the magnet high school LACHSA (Los Angeles County High School for the Arts)—where she would take her first formal classes studying jazz and classical music—Garcia’s listening habits grew to include artists and bands like The White Stripes, Pinback, School of Seven Bells, and Bat for Lashes. More recently, though, she’s been inspired by Mexican-American singer-songwriter Lhasa De Sela (“she inspires me with her mystical and emotive vocals”) and the ways Anderson .Paak and M.I.A. meld their own personality and songwriting with modern production. “I knew that to make the kind of album I wanted to make, I’d have to channel a similar fearlessness. Plus, people just want to dance—so help them!” The combination of these influences became the foundation for Garcia’s bold and buoyant sound—one that creates her own space by blending cultural traditions with contemporary and visionary styles.

After graduating, Garcia followed her mom and stepdad (a recent seminary graduate) across the country to Accomac, VA (a small community with few people her age) before eventually moving out on her own to Richmond. Though completely different from Los Angeles, it was ultimately the right move for Garcia’s songwriting and career. “I was too young to feel comfortable with just staying in LA,” she says. While her roots in the San Gabriel Valley inspired her to pursue music, moving to Richmond crystallized her artistic vision.

Armed with the skeletons of a few new songs and a collage on her wall that became the artwork for Cha Cha Palace, Garcia just needed to find sparring partners. Enter Eddie Prendergast and Russell Lacy. Garcia first met Prendergast at a show while he was playing with his band the Mikrowaves. Immediately feeling a connection to his appreciation for and way he fluidly married Latin rhythms with rock, Garcia and Prendergast hit it off, and quickly started working on the assured lead single “Karma the Knife.” From there, everything fell into place, with Prendergast joining to produce along with Lacy, the engineer of Garcia’s favorite Richmond studio, Virginia Moonwalker. Garcia credits the duo for helping her connect with everyone who helped her craft Cha Cha Palace, including the Spacebomb Studio staff and others.

Pulling inspiration from her experience growing up in the predominantly immigrant Latinx communities, Garcia’s roots are woven all throughout Cha Cha Palace. And like Lorde and Billie Eilish, she isn’t afraid to tear pages out of her diary and share candid emotions that might be difficult, and oftentimes daunting. The past is always present within her memories, songs, and art, from “Jícama,” to her covers of the traditional Mexican folk song “Llorona” (on which she duets with her mother) and Jose Alfredo Jimenez’s “La Enorme Distancia,” here improvised by her grandmother as included as a vignette. Moving far away from her family takes its toll and that homesickness comes through on each of Cha Cha Palace’s songs. Garcia explains, “I recorded my grandmother performing ‘La Enorme Distancia’ on my cell phone. Since she lives across the country, these lyrics in particular were very moving when I heard her sing them to me.”

“Guadalupe”—which references La Virgen De Guadalupe (a Catholic icon of the Latinx community)—is a meditation on the deity as a dynamic 14 year-old who is the epicenter of a culture, and the power and responsibility that comes along with that. “The more I thought about her, the more I was amazed and inspired by such a young girl being one of the most highly regarded figures among men and women. This is why I repeat ‘I want to be like her!’ I thought about what I wanted my little sisters to hear. I really challenged myself with all of my songs, to write about things that I wanted other people to hear. It’s really weird out there,” she says with a laugh. “I wanted to be the voice that I wanted to hear.”

This kind of humanity and honesty that audiences seek is found in spades throughout Cha Cha Palace. Two years in the making, the album is the result of Garcia’s daily experience of finding her own sense of identity and place, feeling torn between saying and doing, of being a voice and speaking with your voice, of being Latinx while being American. “The U.S. is a country made up of people from other countries,” says Garcia. “In my case, I’m American, but I am also Mexican & Salvadoran because of my family blood. Seems like people in power are concerned with preserving some sort of ideal American identity. The irony here is that I am just as much a part of that identity–to knock my family and I down is to knock down all of America’s history.”