One night, a traveling melody knocked at the door of singer and multi-instrumentalist Alex E. Chávez—a visitor, dressed in garb not quite placeable, with a face blurred, though vaguely familiar, like a friend long unseen. “It stuck with me, this melody. Though I didn’t then know why,” Chávez said. Singing it in near darkness while plucking out chords on his nylon-string guitar, he felt he’d met something bigger than himself—mysterious, powerful, embracing.

Fast-forward a few weeks to an archive in sweltering Texas heat: classic albums in bins, questions on the mind, artistic promise in the air. A record cut in the 1980s was spinning on deck—a record, as it happens, made by Chávez’s own father. “And there it was,” Chávez said. “That very same melody, the one that came knocking at my door. It was the voice of my father in his twenties.” 

Equal parts dream and memory, spirit echo and migration story, that melody forms part of the sonic texture of Chicago quintet Dos Santos’s propulsive new album, Es Amor. (The title song, “Es Amor,” is a rearrangement of the song by Chávez’s father, “El Amor.”) So too does that melody’s journey set up the album’s core message, delivered with ánimo and style: love, in all its shades and surprise appearances, remains the most spirited, lasting response to a world marred by hate. Love, in all its ways, remains. 

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Sonically, Dos Santos’s Es Amor, the band’s fourth full-length release (released on Otherly Love Records), is a groove haven, a thrumming balm for trying days. Tight, intricate drums build syncopations to set bodies in motion, their interlocking rhythms creating friction, heat. Spectral, clarion vocals layer into thick harmonies, hanging in the air like knowing sighs. Warbling synths and electric guitars and spoken-word poems and elliptical choruses link arms and sway, all moving together to evoke a definitively Américan conversation. Listening to it all feels like arriving at a huge downtown dancefloor in the early hours of the morning, a convening at once a limpia (cleanse) and its own revolution. 

“We wanted to make a record that sounds like us live—raw, intense,” Chávez said. Produced by Grammy Award–winner Beto Martinez, brought to life by a quintet that knows no bounds—Jaime Garza, Nathan Karagianis, Peter “Maestro” Vale, Daniel Villarreal, and Chávez—the album makes good on that intention, the sound itself a performance of migration, gathering, and love. 

Unexpected resonances abound across its ten crystalline tracks: son jarocho and cumbia rub elbows with psychedelic rock, contemporary jazz, and Afro-Cuban percussion; familiar bass lines and chord strums and lyrical croons surprise when they appear, made fresh and gleaming by creative arrangements and production. At every turn, Dos Santos’s sounds and sentiments align, creating peaks and valleys that beg to be responded to with hips, feet, hands, hearts. 

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“Making this album together, each of us bringing our own stories and experiences, I couldn’t help but think of my father, of his melody, of everyone like him, then and now,” Chávez said. “Of people, immigrants, writing and singing love songs in the most brutal of circumstances, amidst power working to deny them their very humanity.” In this moment in which fear feels like an unwanted lingua franca—in which cruel, violent raids on cities and more have broken families and spirits, repressed dissent, surveilled communication, and taken lives—songs like these remind us all of ourselves and each other, of beauty and audacity and compassion and more. They remind us of our linked stories and places and movements—of those flatlands and mountains, those rivers and oceans, those family homes and tight city quarters. They remind us, in the face of overwhelming odds, of the urgency of renewed connection, and of what that feeling can sound like. 

So, blast this album loud, and let it move you into bliss. Feel its vibrations in your bones, and know, as you do: it’s love, it’s love.

-Jonathan Leal