Austin Band Superfónicos Brings the Heat

Bridging Colombian Funk, Caribe Soul, and messages of unity and peace, Superfónicos has one thing to say to their listeners: ¡Suelta!

Superfónicos in the Austin Monthly tent at ACL Fest.

October was a good month for Superfónicos. Not only did they release their debut EP, Suelta, they also played ACL Music Fest for the first time. Songs like the title track and “Merecumbe” released an energy into the crowd at the Tito’s Vodka stage that had everyone on their feet, dancing and jumping to the rhythms. Even people walking by couldn't resist coming to the stage to dance and groove.

The origins of the band date back to 2014, when bassist Nicolas Sanchez and guitarist Erick Bohorquez paired up to create a group that exhibited Afro-Colombian rhythms inspired by their Colombian heritage.

“I grew up in Dallas and my parents are both from Bogotá, Colombia,” Sanchez said when all members of the group visited the Austin Monthly tent during ACL Music Fest. “Growing up I always just wanted to connect back to Colombia and the most logical way for me as a musician was through music. I always wanted to put together a band that kind of focused on Colombian music moreover than just like salsa or other sounds that are a little more prevalent in the states.”

Soon after, guitarist Andres Villegas and drummer Daniel Sanchez joined the band, followed in 2016 by vocalist Jaime Ospina, who moved to Austin from Colombia. Adding to the unique sound is percussionist Nicholas Tozzo, tenor saxophonist Raymond Johnson, and Evan Marley Hegarty on keys.

In November 2016, the group started gigging and recording music. It took almost two years to create Suelta, which means to let go or release things that hold people back, and, for the band, is a response to today’s political climate and decolonization.

“It pretty much talks about like dropping off all the mental garbage that has been put in our brains for hundreds of years,” Ospina said. “There’s a lot of stuff that we need to stop thinking if we really want to go forward.  

“You get to the point where you are not convinced [about] the way things are happening. If you really want to create a different reality, then you got to start by reviewing what you think. Then you start realizing a lot of things that you think are not really taking you anywhere, so you just gotta let it go.”  

Adding to Ospina’s point, Sanchez compares it to television. “There’s a lot of conditioning that happens just growing up in the United States and really everywhere. Just through television and radio and everything,” he said. “That’s why they call it, you know, television programming: They are programming your brain. So you just got to kind of break that mold and really realize that you’re trying to be geared to be a certain way or to act a certain way and it's not necessarily a catch-all for everybody.”

The fourth song on the album, the energetic “Merecumbe,” is one of the bands favorite songs to perform. According to Ospina, the word is basically a rhythm created by a musician named Pacho Galan.   

“He’s like a Colombian Duke Ellington, like a composer and arranger that was writing music for Colombian big bands. He just decided to create this rhythm [in the 1950s] that is basically a mix of merengue and cumbia, and that’s why it’s called merecumbe,” he said.

So far, the band has only performed around Texas, but they have big dreams to take their music to Mexico and more cities, where they can connect to more audiences.

“If I see people enjoying themselves, singing the words, even if they’ve never seen us before, and just catching on to a lyric and just start singing, it’s the best. “Suelta” is a very catchy one because we say “suelta” like 800 times in the song. By the end of the song, everybody is saying it and it’s just a really beautiful thing,” Sanchez said.  

The band hopes to spread messages of unity and encourages everyone to vote and make their voices heard.

“Unity. I think that’s a word that really brings together the whole mind frame of the band,” Bohorquez said. “Unite, get together, go back to your communities. Get together with the people around you.”  

Superfónicos plays the Mohawk on Nov. 8. Find more tour dates here.

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This article was published for Austin Monthly on November 3, 2018.