Tucson band XIXA plays Valley Bar in downtown Phoenix tomorrow, marking 10 years since the release of its debut album Bloodline and everything the band has built since. The show caps a decade-long transformation that started with a secretive cover band that didn't use photos in its promotion.
That band was called Chicha Dust, and according to KJZZ, it began as an underground project performing Peruvian chicha songs. Brian López and Gabriel Sullivan started it, the station reports, with a practical motive in mind. “We just had this idea, why don’t we subsidize our solo careers by starting a really fun cover band,” López told the station, explaining the move let them skip taking other jobs.
Chicha itself is a specific strain of cumbia that comes out of Peru, tied to working-class listeners in Iquitos and Lima from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, per the station's reporting. López discovered the genre almost by accident, after performing the Peruvian song “Ojos Azules” while opening for Marianne Dissard in New York City. Olivier Conan, he said, handed him a CD afterward that reshaped his musical direction entirely. “And he gave me a CD, and it just — it blew my mind,” López recalled.
No Photos, No Bio, No Marketing
In its early days, Chicha Dust deliberately stayed out of the spotlight, skipping marketing, social media, photographs and even a biography, the station's report notes. That changed only when the band's local popularity drew interest from South by Southwest. The group caved in 2013, López said, finally supplying a photo and short bio once invited to the festival. That same year, the band toured alongside two other national chicha acts, Chicha Libre from New York and Money Chicha from Austin, Texas, according to KJZZ.
Around 2014, the band made its pivotal decision: stop performing covers and start writing original material. “Let’s start writing our own material,” was the idea, as López put it to the station, and the goal was to filter chicha through the group's own backgrounds in indie rock and songwriter Americana. The result became XIXA, a name and sound distinct from the cover band that preceded it.
Bloodline Becomes the Band's Throughline
XIXA released its first full-length album, Bloodline, in 2016, as reported by Tucson.com, blending indie rock, songwriter Americana, chicha, sonidero and bolero influences into a moody, southwestern psychedelic rock sound rooted in the border region. Barbès Records describes the result as a mix of the band's rock past with its passion for psychedelic cumbia — essentially desert rock with a Latin edge. The album includes the songs “Down From the Sky” and “Killer,” the latter a track López contributed to substantially, along with the title song “Bloodline,” which he described as a throughline running through the rest of the band's records.
XIXA's lineup has included Jason Urman on keyboards, Geoffrey Hidalgo on bass, Efren Cruz Chavez on timbales and percussion, and Winston Watson on drums, according to Phoenix New Times. Hidalgo had played music with López in multiple bands before joining, while Watson came aboard after playing with Bob Dylan. López and Sullivan, who co-founded the group, are also members of Howe Gelb's Giant Sand and have played with Calexico, according to Songwriting Magazine.
From Tucson Desert Rock to Collaborations Abroad
XIXA's sound has continued pulling from multiple directions since Bloodline. Its later work mines the band's Tucson desert rock ethos, borrowing from psychedelic rock and the group's love of Italian Spaghetti Westerns, as Tucson.com reported around the release of the band's sophomore album. That same report notes the band invited Algerian Tuareg desert rock quintet Imarhan to collaborate on the song “Eve of Agnes.”
On a later record, XOLO, arrangements flex between rhythmic cumbia rock, muscular psychedelia and strong flashes of punk, according to This Is Tucson. More recently, the band put out an album last year called XOLO and toured Europe behind it, López told KJZZ, part of what the band describes overall as extensive touring around the world.
A Decade On, Playing the Songs That Started It All
The group — which describes its musical approach as “The New Southwest,” according to Valley Bar — is marking a full decade since Bloodline with tomorrow's show in downtown Phoenix. For a band that once refused to even take a promotional photo, playing a hometown-adjacent anniversary set feels like its own kind of milestone.
