Brooklyn Band Alejandro Announces Debut Album ¡CON GUSTO!

Brooklyn indie pop band Alejandro will release its debut album, ¡CON GUSTO!, on February 5, 2027. The lead single 'Anaheim' and its companion video are available now.

The record tells stories about relationships dying and being born, delivered with an earnest, easygoing style that belies the group's sophisticated palette and lush, jazz-influenced arrangements. On ¡CON GUSTO!, people are always on the verge of finding or losing each other. A pair of best friends travel abroad at the dawn of adulthood, not realizing that the trip will mark the end of their brotherly bond. One small-town layabout reminisces about another who's decided to set out in search of a bigger life. An awkward early stab at romance contains within it the story of a whole relationship to come. A son reflects on his last moments with his father, wondering why he couldn't be more present while it was still possible.

'A lot of the record is me trying to conjure and hold on to these memories that I wasn't able to form at the time, because I was stressed out or in a weird place,' says singer and songwriter Alex Silva. From that initial impulse to record a moment begins a process of refining, of burnishing and rearranging the lived details until they reveal wider emotional truths—and, in that way, remain alive in the minds of their listeners. As Silva sings in 'Road,' a propulsive account of a creative partnership gone bad, streaked with iridescent synth leads and powered by a motorik rhythm section: 'Only art survives/The rest is stolen by the past.'

Silva draws from a broad swath of inspiration: the diaristic directness of Sun Kil Moon and the elliptical narratives of Blood on the Tracks; the theatrical exuberance and subtle harmonic colorations of Prefab Sprout and Scott Walker; the sneaky sophistication of Third Eye Blind, whose songs, Silva points out, are a lot more musically and emotionally complex than their status as '90s radio chestnuts would have you believe.

Where he might have previously spent time honing every player's instrumental lines, this time Silva focused on the core songwriting and his casually expressive singing, trusting his collaborators to fill out the frameworks he'd constructed. They were easy musicians to trust: drummer Jesse Chevan; bassist and keyboardist Charlie Hack; guitarist Ryan El-Solh (Scree, Office Culture); pedal steel player Luke Bergman (Bill Frissell, Andrew Bird); cornetist Mike Irwin (The Walkmen, Elvis Perkins); and saxophonist Ivan Arteaga. Many of these musicians, fixtures of a Brooklyn scene at the nexus of jazz and indie rock, have worked together in other configurations before, and their conversational interplay lends itself to ¡CON GUSTO!'s languid and easygoing atmosphere.

About Alejandro

Silva began writing the songs that would become ¡CON GUSTO! in 2022, while his previous band, the math-rock-inflected Personal Space (Tiny Engines), was dissolving. Newly in need of an outlet, he found himself reaching toward a more direct and intuitive songwriting mode, starting from the simplest musical ideas, and allowing whatever associations they brought out for him to guide the songs' development. 'Picking up on the feeling of a piece of music and opening yourself to it, letting it trigger things in you—that's a skill in itself. That isn't always how I've written, but it's how I write now,' he says.

¡CON GUSTO! can be presaved on Bandcamp. More information is available at the band's website and on Spotify.

Photo Credit: Josie Keefe and Jonny Campolo