Combo Chimbita Release New Album ‘Ire’ Today
Deemed “powerful music that speaks to a global counterculture movement” by the San Francisco Chronicle, New York City’s Combo Chimbita has released their new album IRÉ today. Listen to it here.
“Within the saga of Combo Chimbita,” reflects guitarist Niño Lento es Fuego about each of the band’s releases, “El Corredor del Jaguar (2016) finds this eternal being lost outside their realm and returning to Abya Yala (2017) in order to heal and restore peace to the continent. Ahomale (2019) appears as a guiding energy of resistance and now IRÉ (2022) represents those chosen to lead the revolution and materialize the good fortunes foretold in their divinations.”
IRÉ is a cathartic record, channeling the fear, rage and empathy of a world in flames into an urgent spirit of musical dissidence. The album's evocative title is forged upon double-edged meaning: on one hand embracing the divinely inspired blessings and prosperity foretold by our spiritual elders, and on the other a brazen, propulsive affirmation of revolutionary futures in the making. Within this limitless temporal vision, IRÉ finds its rallying spark in convulsive present day realities by metabolizing the anxieties of systemic racism, capitalist decadence, totalitarian governments and the attempted erasure of queer and trans people.
The release of IRÉ is accompanied by four auto-fictional narrative videos with prominent queer and trans performance artists in Puerto Rico for singles “Memoria”, “Babalawo”, “Oya” and “Yo Me Lo Merezco.” The series, produced by trans director and manager Oscar Diaz, “builds a critical bridge with queer & trans artists whose work illuminate ways of resisting, of living, [and] of stretching into generations of wisdoms,” they added. Each single release has made this clearer, with UPROXX trumpeting Combo Chimbita as “making some of the most incredibly inspired music in the world right now... [and] pushing incredible boundaries in keeping these stories at the forefront.”
“It's important to listen and feel this worry and the desire to change and improve things,” adds Oliveros, capturing IRÉ’s transcendent purpose to heal and construct a new world through the power of music. Like the jaguar before them, Combo Chimbita carries on; delicate, resilient and roaring.