Having some of the first songs you ever create go viral on streaming services can be both a blessing—and a curse.
Local indie-pop group Koka knows this well. Their first release, “Baby’s Breath,” now has tens of thousands of Spotify streams—even though band members remember the track as “shitty” and think their earlier works are “not good.”
Maybe the band—Edith Aldaz on vocals, Sebastian Camacho on bass and Ubaldo “Uba” Norzagaray on guitar and synthesizer—is being too self-critical. After all, the band has had fans since its beginning, in 2018. After growing as artists, songwriters and producers through a few singles, the band is finally released its debut EP, 4EVER, on Oct. 26.
If catchy synth-riffs, dance-y beats and beautiful, reverb-soaked vocals are your jam, then you’ll love 4EVER. The five-song project (I was able to hear four of the songs in advance) includes sunshine pop sounds on “Flight,” while “Fantasies” is a dark, sweaty club banger. “Is This the Day” has a groove that sounds like it was plucked straight from the local ‘80s radio station, and “Strung” mixes video-game synth with operatic, soothing vocals.
During a recent Zoom interview, the band members explained how they focused in on crafting 4EVER.
“I remember after we played the Indio Tamale Festival in 2021, the next day, I was driving back to my dorm at school in L.A., and I was on a phone call with Uba,” Camacho said. “All we were talking about was our previous music, because we realized that the song that people mainly liked had specific factors about it—and we incorporated those specific things into the new music. We used to think that putting a bunch of instruments on one song would make it better, so with this whole project, we stripped it back and limited what we put on. We just mainly focused on synths, catchy vocals and having really good-sounding drum machines.”
One of the songs mentioned on that phone call was “Muchacho de Los Ojos Tristes,” a song Koka covered and released in August of that year.
“I was like, ‘When we play that at shows … that’s what they enjoy the most,’ and I know it has a lot to do with the fact that it’s a catchy and classic song—but I think we did a good job of Koka-fying it and making our version,” Camacho said.
Added Norzagaray: “That song brought us together in terms of how we wanted to move forward with our new music. That song is very synth-heavy and has great melodies, so we were focusing on writing catchier melodies. For a lot of the songs on the EP, we went through three or four different versions of melodies until we actually chose one. It was the same thing with the lyric process. We really focused on trying to make this as enjoyable, easy to listen to and catchy as possible.”
For nearly two years, Koka went through a process of trial and error, crafting more than 20 songs to find the sound and direction for 4EVER.
“I tell these guys all the time that, for me personally, all five songs are very strong,” Norzagaray said. “We’ve been working on them for so long, and I can still listen to them and enjoy them and not get tired of them.”
Added Camacho: “Before—not that we would hate the songs—but we would listen to them and just not really feel anything. It would be like, ‘All right; it’s finished, and it sounds like that song we wrote before,’ I think with these ones, no matter what version we heard, we felt like it kept getting better. We’ve been playing them live … but the final version we have, no one’s heard those versions. They’re different, and we’ve changed certain lyrics or specific melodies, or have certain outros and intros or bridges. People were liking it live, so we can’t wait to see what they’re going to say when it comes out.”
Of course, the songwriting process has to eventually come to an end.
“We can sit here for another three years and just keep working on them,” Camacho said. “There’s always going to be something we can change, but I think all music has an expiration date when you’re working on it, and it has to be released. Otherwise, it’s going to stay this thing that you’re always working on.”
4EVER shows Koka’s progression as a band—and that can be credited, in part, to the fact that every step of the songwriting process was fully collaborative.
“We all took part in writing the lyrics, unlike in the past,” Aldaz said. “We’ve been more collaborative on that, and we’ve also been more collaborative on writing the vocal melodies. It really shows what we can all put into the project. It’s not just like, ‘Uba does this part, and Sebastian does this’; all of us meet together and show all our thoughts. It helped to move the theme of the EP, because I wanted the theme to show someone’s progression of life, with them going through the struggle, them going through their mistakes, then learning from them and overcoming what comes after.”
The darkwave vibes of aforementioned sweaty club-banger “Fantasies” are a tad different from previous Koka songs.
“Around 2021, the shit we were making was darker, for some reason,” Camacho said. “We were trying to make a song for It Came From the Desert, Vol. 1, and then all of the stuff we were making was dark. I think it comes from a lot of the influence that we have from ’80s music. I was listening to a lot of New Order and Boy Harsher, and I knew we wanted to experiment more with drum machines and synths and synth bass, and it just kind of came naturally. … There was a point where we were like, ‘All right, it’s there; we may or may not use it,’ but it was one of the songs we kept coming back to. Every little thing we added, it just kept getting better and better.”
(Full disclosure: I was the person who put together It Came From the Desert, Vol. 1.)
The band members said they’ve noticed their music is better when they collaborate.
“When it comes to sharing ideas, we’re all very open, and at the end of the day, it comes to what’s best for the song,” Camacho said. “I’ll tell you right now, I’ve mentioned so many dogshit ideas, but I feel like if the three of us keep throwing stuff to the wall, something’s going to stick. … If there are specific ideas that I’m iffy about, and one of us is like, ‘I’m very confident about this; trust me on this,’ then we go ahead.”
One example of this is “No Quiero Llorar,” the first song Koka wrote for 4EVER (and the only song on the EP not mentioned earlier).
“I didn’t like it, actually,” Camacho said. “I scrapped it within a year, and thought it was just whatever, but Uba really liked it and wanted to work on it and have it on the project. I was like, ‘All right, I trust this guy,’ and if he says he sees something in it, then sure, we’ll work on it. It’s still here, and it’s going to be released. It’s sounding really, really good.”
Camacho reflected back on earlier Koka releases, and said the comparison between those songs and the new EP is “night and day.”
“All the songs, even the last thing we released, that was us working our way around GarageBand and Logic and learning how to make songs and learning how to play instruments—and now it’s all led up to this,” said Camacho. “We feel like we have a very solid project, and we can’t wait for people to listen to it. This feels like we just started Koka yesterday, and this is our first song we’re going to release.”
For more information, visit www.soundcloud.com/koka10 or www.instagram.com/koka.wav.
