Chicago may be a thousand miles from the deserts of West Texas, but the Midwest hub is still home to some of the most exciting ready-made Western soundtracks for modern-day America courtesy of Dos Santos. The outfit is gearing up to release their fourth album Es Amor later this month, and the project’s cumbia-leaning new single “El Lobo” embraces the aesthetic of Southwestern gunslinging via its ambling guitar and overall spacious sound. “Some of the guitar work certainly edges toward a Western feel,” the band shares, “and Alex [Chavez]’s falsetto singing embodies a wolf’s howl. This melancholic, moody approach to cumbia is definitely a Dos Santos staple.”
While said howl is conceivably enough reason for the track’s lupine title, the band adds that its Spanish-language lyrics empathize with the migrant’s experience in an age of militant border patrol. “The lyrics’ imagery evokes the desert landscape where Alex grew up in West Texas,” the band adds. “And the story conveyed is about crossing that terrain as a stranger, as a traveler, as a migrant (embodied in the figure of the wolf), and both the vulnerability of that experience—the literal exposure to the elements—and the necessity of leaning against memory, hope, and love to get you through, as you leave one home in search of another.”
Check out “El Lobo” below, and pre-order Es Amor here ahead of its August 28 release via Otherly Love.
