From Bogotá to Brooklyn, this adventurous four-piece has mapped a tropical futurist’s dream of spacy electronics, new-wave cumbia and good old-fashioned garage rock.

Contrary to the alleged prevailing wisdom, the Brooklyn underground remains as vital as ever. While stalwarts like the Daptone family, Antibalas and Oneida still hold down the old guard, there are fresh-faced upstarts like Russian Baths, Native Sun, Vagabon and many more stoking a veritable heatwave of restless creativity, even as the borough’s live music scene has withstood a radical shift in available real estate over the last few years.

The members of Combo Chimbita know the terrain. With family roots in the Colombian cities of Barranquilla and Bogotá, vocalist/guitarist Niño Lento and bassist, multi-instrumentalist and singer Prince of Queens both came to New York as teenagers. They met while studying traditional Colombian rhythms at a percussion workshop in Queens; Prince of Queens was into punk, ska, grunge and hardcore, while Lento was an avowed metal head, but they both felt drawn to the sounds of their native country.

“I was always in touch with the music scene there,” Lento says. “Initially I was most interested in the traditional sounds like drums and marching bands. Cumbia [Colombia’s popular folk music] came later, when we started working and playing together. And for us, the most important part of doing that was to have fun. Maybe nothing’s gonna happen, maybe we’re not gonna be famous, but we have a great time together. That’s what makes it worth it.”

They hooked up with drummer Dilemastronauta—who was living in Boston but eventually moved to New York—and started improvising in earnest, crafting a retro-futuristic, psychedelic sound, augmented by analog synths and effects, that breathes with complex, syncopated rhythms. In 2014, they released their first single, a cumbia-in-dub-style workout called “Puro Show,” on the Brooklyn-based Names You Can Trust label. That won them a regular monthly gig at Barbès, a vibrant hangout in the Park Slope neighborhood. One night, an inspired Carolina Oliveros jumped onstage and grabbed the microphone and, suddenly, Combo Chimbita had a powerhouse lead singer.

“She has a huge presence, a very strong energy and a leading role in what we do,” Prince of Queens observes. “She’s the power that really drives everything. When we’re recording, it always starts with music. We might have a rhythm that we want to do something with, and then we just start improvising. That’s the thing—we don’t like to be so square, you know? Dilema has a jazz background, so he can groove for a long time on some crazy stuff, and I just try to keep up with him, honestly. [Laughs.] But sometimes we hit on a really good loop or something, and then we’re like, ‘Oh, that could be a song.’”

Abya Yala, released last year on Figure & Ground (another local indie imprint), sums up the group’s strengths as a voracious and versatile unit. Afro-Caribbean and Latin beats collide with Peruvian chicha, Colombian cumbia and modern electronics to create a feverishly churning soundscape for Oliveros’ elastic voice, which she can temper to a hypnotic soprano (on the tripped-out opener “Dame tu Mano”) or open wide in an ecstatic roar (on the explosive “Cachimba”). In translation, her lyrics reflect the spiritual nature of the band’s ethos, which oscillates between a deep respect for the art and culture of their ancestors and a remarkably optimistic rallying cry for their generation. The infectious single “No Regreso” sums up the epiphany in progress: “The new generation’s mysteries are revealed/ The resistance is chosen/ Everyone saw the jaguar/ Every night, they touched it.”

When asked whether Combo Chimbita’s music could be perceived as political, Prince of Queens demurs. “It’s deeper than the system itself,” he says. “We’re not really trying to confront anyone. More than anything, we’re looking for our own awakening through the music. With a lot of people in our generation, and also being an immigrant, I feel like things are very confused. I mean, I’m confused about where I really come from and where I am. I was born in Bogotá, in a huge city, living in an apartment and listening to American music on the radio and TV, but is that really who I am? I started questioning that, and through the music, I think we’re all searching for that inspiration and that awakening. Music is powerful enough to bring that to us and, hopefully, to other people.”

Currently at work on a new album, the band continues to expand its creative horizons, whether on stage or in the studio. Even after they’re recorded, Combo Chimbita’s songs are far from set in stone; for Niño Lento and his bandmates, it’s better to surrender to where the wind takes you, rather than lock yourself into one way of doing things. After all, the payoff is much more meaningful when the music can transport you to a higher plateau.

“Basically, that’s what we look for every time we play, you know?” he says animatedly. “You need to get to that. It’s a state of mind, like being in church. You can feel the heat, like when you’re cooking! That’s an element that we bring from our own experiences. Music has this power to take you to a different level, a spiritual level, and we try to always achieve this. We all come from this understanding, whether it’s traditional music or techno or house or whatever. That’s why we keep improvising. We know we gotta get there.”

This article originally appears in the October/November 2018 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.