Latin Playboys

Two Los Lobos songwriters handed their home-cassette scraps to a pair of studio obsessives, and what came back is one of the strangest gorgeous accidents in American roots music — folk songs recorded like they were transmitting from another room, another decade.

David Hidalgo and Louie Pérez taped these fragments at home, and Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake refused to clean them up, instead building outward from the hiss and warp. "Viva La Raza" opens the record mid-clatter, half a marching band collapsing into a groove, and the trick is that the tune underneath is real and durable, not a studio prank. "Forever Night Shade Mary" proves the point best: a haunted, aching melody that would sound at home on any Los Lobos album, here draped in reverb and tape-decay until it feels overheard rather than performed. That gap between the sturdy song and the ghostly recording is the whole reason to keep it playing.