San Diego’s Los Saints have released their new EP, Welcome To Confusion on Enci Records today. With the new EP, the band (comprised of first-generation Mexican-Americans, cousins Angel Mariscal and Emiliano Garcia, and mutual friend Gianluca Exposito) continues to build off of the success of their recent singles, “IDK” and “Fouund You Somewhere”. Listen to it now below.
Welcome To Confusion is a coming of age record, one that finds the young band striving to make sense of both where they’re from and where they’re going. For Mariscal, that meant making peace with himself after an especially painful breakup, learning that sometimes the end of relationships offer no easy answers.
“I think I was still in shock when I wrote most of the EP because it came together about a week after an abrupt end to my first serious relationship — so abrupt that it was almost like there hadn’t been anything there to begin with,” says Mariscal.
Working with an outside producer for the first time, Los Saints enlisted Dear Boy drummer Keith Cooper to record the EP. Of the experience, Mariscal says, “Keith is awesome first of all. He’s really freaking good at what he does as an instrumentalist, recording engineer and producer. He knew it was our first time recording professionally as well and, though the process was new to us, he made it seem like we’ve done it together a million times.” He adds, “It’s very safe to say he understood the emotions that I had put behind the songs and he added onto that, subtly, but (importantly). Keith worked his magic with effects and ‘distant’ sounds such as the tambourine in ‘IDK’, or the synth sound in the chorus of ‘Fouund You Somewhere’ and tons of other layers that, while they might not be in the forefront, make your ears happy.”
The time in the studio and the experience of making ‘Welcome To Confusion’ helped the trio become even more cohesive and allowed Mariscal to grow more confident as a songwriter. “I learned how much easier it is to express myself and my emotions through music versus in conversation,” he recalls. “In a conversation I’ll hold back on saying certain things about myself and my experiences because I’ll wonder if they’ll have trouble relating, but in my music, I’ll basically expose myself no problem because I know there’s somebody listening to our song out there that can relate to what I’m saying.”
As Los Saints prepares to release its latest effort into the world, Mariscal says “There’s something special about these songs, and I can only hope people experience as much emotion listening to them as we did when we were making them. I want for people to feel like our music is something that they can listen to as an outlet and feel like we’re friends without even meeting. I just want people to understand us, and we want to understand them. That’s the magic of music, isn’t it?”