Ritmo Cascabel Brings Cumbia-Psych to the Hi-Dive This Weekend

Ritmo Cascabel is carrying on the rich tradition of Denver bands that are influenced by the city's extensive Latin history, merging the melting tenor of psychedelic rock with the shuffling rhythm of cumbia into a vortex of sound and groove. The band’s genre can be closely associated with the Peruvian cumbia scene known as chicha, which emerged in the ’70s and is characterized by mixing cumbia, Andean music and vals criollo with the reverb-laden, distorted sounds of surf and psych rock.

And after a rapid ascension within the local music scene, Ritmo Cascabel will play the hi-dive on Saturday, August 26, to debut its eponymous full-length debut with support from Rootbeer Richie and the Reveille and DJ Polvo de Muertos.

Comprising members of multiple Denver bands, including Kinky Fingers, Love Gang and Los Narwhals, Ritmo Cascabel found its roots right before the pandemic after a fateful night at Pon Pon. Dancing to their friend's DJ set of cumbia inspired the future bandmembers to book a practice room at RocketSpace to jam and figure out if there was something there. “We all love cumbia because most of us are from Mexico, so we already loved it so much, and we've been trying to play it before, but I don't know, that night just...it just clicked,” says keyboardist/flutist Leonardo Munoz from a street corner in Madrid, where he’s on tour with Love Gang.

Despite releasing a Ritmo EP during the pandemic, it wasn’t until the band's upcoming release that its members believed they'd found their sound. “We have released an EP before where we just started experimenting with the sounds of chicha, trying to find our own sound — because everybody makes their own sound out of the genre,” says Munoz. “And for this album, we finally found the sound of the band.”

He says that on Ritmo Cascabel, which was released August 18 on all streaming platforms, listeners can expect to hear influences from salsa, merengue, chicha, cumbia, surf and Western psych rock.

The band decided to record its album in Mexico City at a studio in the Roma Norte neighborhood. The bandmates spent four nights there, tracking during the day and going out to clubs around the city at night.

Then for a while after recording, they sat on the album, extensively critiquing the songs' mix-down and mastering, and shipping it around to labels that they thought might consider printing it on vinyl. Ritmo Cascabel eventually decided to self-release it, noting the importance of having an album out so listeners new and old can see where the band is in its direction.

“We raised some money to mix and master it, then print it on vinyl, which took a little bit longer than we would have liked it to take,” recalls Munoz. “But we're excited that it's coming out now, because all these tracks are fresh to everyone else. We have new songs, we have material for a second album, but we are really proud of the first one, too, and we just wanna keep promoting that one.”

Despite much of the focus being on the current album, Ritmo Cascabel sees itself as a live band first and foremost. “We're a really energetic band. We really make sure to engage the audience with the gig and not just play our songs — we just get hyped, really,” explains Munoz. “We try to do stuff like, 'Okay, in this part, let's jump or let's start clapping,' or weird shit like that to keep the party going.” While Munoz doesn’t believe that such audience engagement is unique to his band, he does believe that it is in part responsible for Ritmo Cascabel's rise in the scene.

The band is also in good company: Denver supports many Latin-infused bands, among them Los Mocochetes, Don Chicharrón and Gio Chamba, which all evangelize the sound by tapping into the city’s deep Hispanic legacy.

“There's a big Hispanic population in Denver among the youth, and they have always loved rock, and now combining it with cumbia is kind of like, ‘Oh, like this reminds me of what I grew up listening to from our parents, but also combined with the stuff I like,’’ says Munoz. “We're just trying to keep it moving. It seems like there's been more and more cumbia and chicha bands traveling to Denver, because they know that people wanna see it here.”

Ritmo Cascabel, 9 p.m. Saturday, August 26, hi-dive, 7 South Broadway. Tickets are $20.