Chicano Batman at First Avenue on May 10, 2020 has been rescheduled and will take place on July 9, 2022. All tickets purchased for the original May 2020 and rescheduled June and December 2021 dates will be honored.

Prefer a refund? Just reach out to your point of purchase. Refund requests for this show can be made through April 29, 2022.

Doors at 7:30PM | Show starts at 8:30PM | 18+ | $20 Advance | $22 Day of Show

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They came out of L.A., four young men in vintage formalwear, playing songs that blended Brazilian Tropicalía with early ’70s psychedelic soul and the romantic pop of bands like Los Ángeles Negros. It was an immediately addictive sonic brew, and their reputation grew fast. Since forming in 2008, Chicano Batman have released two full-length albums—a self-titled 2009 debut, and 2014’s Cycles Of Existential Rhyme—and two EPs. The band has played Coachella, and toured with Alabama Shakes and Jack White, among others. Now, they’re making their boldest statement yet with Freedom Is Free, their third album and ATO Records debut.

Frontman Bardo Martinez met bassist Eduardo Arenas in 2008, and they quickly found common ground in the work of Caetano Veloso and other Tropicalía performers, as well as the kind of vintage soul and pop heard on “the albums our parents have in their closets.” They recruited drummer Gabriel Villa and made their first album as a trio; guitarist Carlos Arévalo joined the band in 2011 and they released The Joven Navegante EP the following year.

Chicano Batman’s look has done as much to set them apart as their sound or their name. Since the beginning, they’ve performed in matching suits and ruffled shirts; Bardo explains, “We’re making a particular reference that some people understand—Los Ángeles Negros, Los Pasteles Verdes. In the ’70s, it was a big thing where all these cats were playing romantic ballads, but they were funky as hell.” That sharp funk groove shows up throughout Freedom Is Free, but especially on the title song. Bardo’s uplifting lyrics, delivered in his uniquely dreamy/romantic style, are bolstered by the backing vocals of New York’s all-female Mariachi Flor de Toloache.

“It’s a counterpoint to the propaganda catch phrase that was invented by the US government during the first Iraq war, ‘Freedom isn’t free,’” he explains. “It’s a counter-narrative…the song itself relates to the idea that freedom is inherent to every individual on this planet and in the universe. I live in Los Angeles, and people are pretty jaded; everybody’s so caught up in their routine they can’t tap into their own spirits. For me, music is about the spirit.”

The first single, “Friendship (Is a Small Boat In A Storm),” is an organ-driven soul jam with buzzing, psychedelic guitar from Carlos (who wrote the music). “I’m not a lyricist,” he says. “I brought in the chords and the instrumental melodies, and I gave it to Bardo. So he wrote the lyrics and the vocal melodies, and then we brought it to the band and they added the rhythmic elements and the overall feel.”

Perhaps the biggest surprise on Freedom Is Free is “The Taker Story.” Over a slow, ominous groove, Bardo unleashes a stinging indictment of imperialism and conquest, with the Mariachi Flor de Toloache amplifying his simmering fury as the band channels the Funkadelic of “March to the Witch’s Castle” and America Eats Its Young. “That’s all Bardo; he composed the bass line, he composed the chords, he had the whole idea for it,” says Carlos. “That’s the only song on the album where the vocals were tracked live. What you hear is what we did.”

Freedom Is Free reflects Chicano Batman’s decision to foreground the soul and R&B elements of their sound. To achieve their ambitious sonic goals, the quartet worked with producer Leon Michels (El Michels Affair, The Arcs) in his Diamond Mine Recording studio in Long Island City, NY. Michels, a veteran in the New York soul revival scene, has performed in Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, The Black Keys and The Menahan Street Band. In addition to tracking the album to analog tape, Michels contributed keyboards and his trademark horn arrangements (he’s been sampled by Jay-Z and Ghostface Killah). The partnership between Michels and Chicano Batman truly captures the band's live energy and brings their aesthetic goals to life.

“They get together, they rehearse every week, they fight about the arrangements, they have a classic band dynamic,” Michels says. “So for me it was really just about shaping up the songs. They were already there, but some of them were eight minutes long, so we had to cut them up and make it so you were engaged from start to finish. They had just come off a tour, and they were tight as hell, so it was just a matter of getting the right take. At the most, we did three takes of a song.” Recording with Michels allowed Chicano Batman access to his collection of vintage gear, which helped expand their creative palette. “The possibilities were sonically endless,” Carlos says. “If you wanted to do something, it was like, ‘Yeah, I have that over here. You want a Mellotron? I have a Mellotron.’ He had amazing equipment, and his aesthetic is right in line with ours.”

Outside the studio, Chicano Batman have built a stellar reputation through heavy touring across the country. They've played major festivals like Coachella and Bonnaroo. Opening for Jack White, Alabama Shakes, The Claypool Lennon Delirium and Gogol Bordello on recent tours has given them the chance to win over thousands of rock fans, night after night. In 2017, they’re planning their own national headline tour, sharing with anyone who wants to hear the news that Freedom Is Free.

Conceived in the 1980s in Mexico and brought to California through the border inside of his 6-month-pregnant mother, Rudy de Anda debut solo record, Tender Epoch (2020) is a love letter to the long historical lineage of rock ’n’ roll music as interpreted through his multicultural lens. “I write my own story, I don’t want to b defined by any scene” De Anda proclaims of his personal journey, and his ability to adapt and flit between cities and cultures is part of why L.A. Record has called his sound “deliberately difficult to classify, familiar but novel at the same time.”

De Anda’s origin story counts more locations than most and setting the scene is a perilous endeavor: his early childhood in Compton was interrupted by the L.A. Riots that pushed his family to relocate to Long Beach, where De Anda stayed only temporarily before catching the chickenpox and being sent to his grandmother’s house in Mexico, where he lived for three months. Only upon his return did De Anda begin to lay roots in the city he still calls home. From playing soccer to getting into dumpster-cage fights (over cilantro) at his Whole Foods job, De Anda always circled back to music as a means to express these experiences that inspired him.

A solo trip to Chile – to go see Spanish musician El Guincho perform – with no cell phone or credit card proved especially influential, and made De Anda realize the profound impact of Latin music on his adult life. In the midst of ceaseless moves, a constant in De Anda’s history was the omnipresent soundtrack in his Hispanic household: from rock and bossa nova, to crooners, ballads and even traditional Mexican music. These sounds of his roots and the angst of the punk bands he embraced as a teenager would soon intertwine harmoniously.

The most influential figure in De Anda’s storied upbringing was without a doubt Ikey Owens of The Mars Volta and Jack White’s band. The late, great Grammy-winning producer struck a friendship with De Anda early on, when he was a teenager to whom Owens would give vinyls and tickets to shows. Owens took a young De Anda under his wing and invited him into his world and into his studio. This is where De Anda began to piece together a solo record, on his mentor’s 8-track, which for the first time felt more personal in execution, and tackled the intimacy and romanticism of generations of the artist’s past, while still employing the scrappy punk rock attitude he has always placed first and foremost in his music and life’s work.

With his childhood friend J.P Bendzinski on guitar and a rotating cast of stalwart band members, the generation-spanning, ever-transforming lineup has adamantly pursued their sound regardless of any limitations. Here, a Mexican psychedelic bolero (“Los Canarios”) turns into an ’80s Spanish rock-inspired tune (“Me Revuelco En Tus Arenas”), and there a William-Onyeabor-inspired dance number (“Helado”) segues into an ode to 1970s Argentina – and one of De Anda’s favorite musicians, Luis Alberto Spinetta – before giving way to a soulful funk number (“I’m Still At The Bar”) and close on a Chicano sweet-soul-vibed track where De Anda confronts his own weaknesses (“Abrasive”). Staying close to home at Jazzcat Studios in Long Beach, the record was produced by Jonny Bell (Crystal Antlers) and features Bardo Martinez (Chicano Batman) on organ and synth, on several tracks.

Since 2005, De Anda has played thousands of shows in various musical projects, but with Tender Epoch, tellingly the first recorded under his own name, he has clearly found his own voice with a wealth of stories to spotlight. It’s exquisitely crafted pop, with universal messages of heartbreak and loss that still feel appropriate played speeding windows-down on the highway in the coastal sunshine. Above all, De Anda likes to keep people guessing: from the album artwork to the multi-faceted textures of sound, Tender Epoch feels ambiguous to any era, a perfect collision of old and new that showcases a music historian’s knowledge of both past greats and influential peers. Sculpting his own path through a wild ride that feels unlikely to let up, De Anda refuses to settle down or get comfortable, instead carving out a classic record that is sure to set a standard for songwriting to come.