NEW ALBUM “ES AMOR”
OUT AUGUST 28th
NEW SINGLE “MONEY GUN”
OUT NOW
Today, Chicago-based quintet Dos Santos return to announce their fourth full-length and first album in five years, Es Amor, out August 28 via Otherly Love. Produced by Grammy Award–winning Beto Martinez, the album is a performance of migration, gathering, and love. "We wanted to make a record that sounds like us live—raw, intense," says lead singer Chávez.
Alongside the announcement, the project unveils lead single "Money Gun," accompanied by a documentary-style music video filmed and directed by Osvaldo Cuevas. The track is a high-energy sweatbox cumbia reminiscent of Mexican grupero jams. Loud, amped, urgent, “Money Gun” is an unabashed celebration of the dancefloor and, as Chávez describes it, "its poetry, intimacy, and movements, where vulnerable bodies share time, share space, and rehearse possibilities between matter and memory."
The album Es Amor grew from an unexpected discovery. A traveling melody came to Chávez one night—mysterious, powerful, and vaguely familiar. Fast-forward a few weeks to an archive in sweltering Texas heat: 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 Es Amor. Its journey also sets 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.
Sonically, Es Amor is a groove haven, a thrumming balm for trying days. Tight, intricate arrangements and production move together to evoke a definitively Américan conversation. Across its ten crystalline tracks, son jarocho and cumbia rub elbows with psychedelic rock, contemporary jazz, and Afro-Cuban percussion. 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.
“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, Dos Santos remind us all of our linked stories and places and movements, and, in the face of overwhelming odds, of the urgency of renewed connection, and of what that feeling can sound like.
Listen to "Money Gun" above and stay tuned for more music ahead of the full release of Es Amor arriving August 28 via Otherly Love.
MUSIC
2026
2026
CITY OF MIRRORS
2021
A SHOT IN THE DARK
2021
VIDEO
TOUR
PRESS
“City Of Mirrors . . . feels like it’s perpetually building and expanding . . . the bolts are tighter than ever on this project — and the subject matter is weighty & pressing, marking an imaginative step forward for a band that’s never limited itself to begin with.” — Rolling Stone
“City of Mirrors . . . reflects a band convinced that artistic ideas and political ones are not necessarily at odds, but different sides of the same truth. A relentlessly kaleidoscopic mosaic of novel sound pairings propelled by Latin rhythms, the album evokes the crisp air, soft color, and enveloping warmth of a greenhouse.” — Pitchfork
“A sweeping epic of Latin American rhythms and borderland poetry . . . The album is a loving melange of tradition, spirituality, and odes to a Latinx diaspora…” — Bandcamp
"I fell in love with the rich textures in this music." – Bob Boilen, NPR Music
"Dos Santos’ lyrics reflect current cultural shifts, just as their music merges the past with the present. This satisfies a yearning felt by many BIPOC to connect their daily lived experience with their roots. For Latine folks in Chicago and beyond, City of Mirrors reflects our heritage and our lineage, and reminds us that we’re an ancient people—we’re still here, and this is what we’re going through. Dos Santos’ music and stories reflect a vibrant cultural awakening that strives to enrich the world.” – Sandra Treviño, Chicago Reader
"[Dos Santos is] a formidable musical force.” - Marcos Hasaan, Remezcla
"There’s a paradoxical relationship between the mesmerizing music that Dos Santos creates and the trauma and frustration that often influences it, but they’re not contradictions by any means. City of Mirrors is an album built on dualities, an album by an American band with Latin American roots. It’s at times an album of mourning, a critique of colonialism and a call for collective action; it’s also a celebration of the spaces where cultural experiences merge and musical traditions come together in a vivid swirl." – Jeff Terich, Treble
"If there is a refuge from the horrors outside of us, Dos Santos seem to suggest it is in the free and bountiful exchange of ideas and hopes and dreams among friends and fellow travelers, a joy—or at least a forcefulness—found in community." – Noisey
"Dos Santos may just be the missing link from Jimi Hendrix to Kamasi Washington."