In 2008, Jarvis Cocker from Pulp, found Banda De Turistas on My Space and he liked them so much that when he played in Argentina at La Trastienda, he had them open up for him and that gave Banda De Turistas a platform to venture out to the rest of Argentina and now the rest of Latin America, the United States and Europe.
With the release of the latest album, Lo Que Más Querés, we had the opportunity to talk to the band about the new album and their musical influences and here is an excerpt of our conversation.
Tell us about this new album, Lo Que Más Querés.
We had the liberty of recording the full album in our own studio in Buenos Aires, and it’s an album we had wanted to make for a long time and an album that we wanted to listen to for a long time. The album shows signs of our maturity and evolution as a band and we think the band consolidates itself as musicians and songwriters on this album. We think our previous three albums have led us to this album as we feel it has the best composition work, best sound and experimentation; and recording it in our own studio, it gave us the freedom to take our time and to be more discriminating with all the ideas we had and being able to pick the best ones.
How would you describe the sound of this new album?
We wanted to have an album with different sounds, so we got into pop, rock, ballads, some electronic music and even danceable.
With such eclectic sounds in your music, what are some of the influences that have marked you the most?
At the beginnings of the band, around 2005-06, we were really into the cultural explosion of the 60’s in the United States and Europe and bands like The Kinks, The Grateful Dead, The Beatles, The Zombies, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and Black Sabbath and all the psychedelic era and we think that is most noticeable on our first album and we learned how to write pop songs from those bands.
Since you mention psychedelic, on your video for “Qimica”, it has a very 60’s psychedelic vibe like those old TV performances by Cream, The Who, CCR and others, was the idea taken from those all TV performances?
Yes, we like working with those kinds of distorted backgrounds as we do on our music and we have always enjoyed mixing up the images with the music, and just like the music, we are also influenced by the aesthetics of that era.
On the video for Delivery de Milagros, you have special guests like Colombian actor Anderson Ballesteros and Adrián Dárgelos from Babasonicos, how did these collaborations come about?
Our record producer, Alberto Moles knew Anderson Ballesteros who took part in the TV series “El Patrón del Mal” which was very popular in Argentina and Anderson happened to be in Argentina for about a week, so we contacted him and he agreed to be on the video so we had to work around his schedule and basically we wanted him to reprise a version of his character in the TV series, which was that of a gangster and killer then we called Adrián Dárgelos to play his boss.
Tell us about some of the most memorable moments in your career as a band so far.
Definitely the first time we went to Mexico in 2009, only a few months after our first album came out and it allowed us our first experience getting to know a new country; then when we went to Spain and that was our first time going to Europe and also playing the United States, playing in California, New York and Las Vegas. All these experiences have been very memorable and we owe it all to our music, we never imagined visiting all these places in our early 20’s, so we are very grateful that we can do this through music, which is what we love.
The album Lo Que Más Querés is available on Spotify and iTunes.
