Chezile

Alejandro Sanchez, better known as Chezile, has had the kind of overnight success that would give anyone whiplash. After 2023 psych-pop single “Beanie” went viral on TikTok, giving Sanchez 1.6 million monthly listeners in under two months, he went from living out of his car in Los Angeles to getting calls from labels. A sensitive soul, the Albuquerque-born multi-instrumentalist and child of Mexican regional musicians is now based in San Diego, where he’s hard at work on a full-length debut.

After 47 garnered an audience for a sentimentality melded with reverberated guitar, an austere indie rock caught somewhere between Tame Impala and Cigarettes After Sex, Chezile kept digging inward. Life now forever changed by his circumstance, he centered himself in childhood explorations skateboarding through the desert landscape of New Mexico in Alē. The EP’s self-referential nature sees Chezile’s nickname —pronounced like the skateboard trick— give an underlying warmth to the music, the kind of feeling one would get flipping through a scrapbook years later when, upon reflection, one is living a completely different moment.

Alex Banin is an LA-based singer-songwriter whose lyrics act as a time capsule of her life. Sonically sitting between indie R&B and pop, Banin has recently started incorporating elements of the folk music she grew up on and the laid-back indie electronic music of her high school days. Banin’s 2024 EP “Since Winona” garnered attention for its lyrically-driven writing, loosely layered vocals, and unconventional percussion sounds. An accidental mic hit, someone dropping a water bottle, people in the room talking in the background of a recording – these chance moments often made their way onto the final recording in an effort to preserve the process and, ultimately, the accidental magic that happens when making music.