Hit La Rosa: “From the beginning they told us that we were not a band for Lima, but for outside”

This Friday night, in Washington DC, United States, the Peruvian band hit the rose will offer the first of several shows that make up the longest and most important tour of his career. A tour that will take them through the North American country and also through Europe, for three months, and that consolidates an internationalization project that – they confess – was planned from the beginning.

“Since the beginning of our career, when Selvámonos took us on as manager, they told us up front that we were not a band for Lima. that they were taking us as a band they could take to outside festivals”, says Chaska Lucero, vocalist of the “tropical psychodelia” group, a simple way to try to describe their constant fusion and sound experimentation.

But how is it that a Peruvian band is worked to sound more outside than within its borders? “What we see is that there are other types of genres that grow faster here [en Perú]”, Lucero explains. “Tastes are different here. In any case, if there are people who like us, it is much smaller, people who already listen to a lot more music and who have a little more ear opening. Abroad, investment in culture is different, perhaps they are prepared to listen to things that break the mold, which is a bit of what we do”, he adds.

MINE AND YOURS

As part of these international frictions, just over a month ago Hit La Rosa published a collaboration with the Spanish-Argentine duo Cosmic Wacho. The song “El Ritmo Latino”, a mix of cumbia and indie pop to which Chaska Lucero lends her voice, is also interesting to analyze because of the way in which musicians from different origins approach tropical rhythms.

“It’s crazy because the vision that Europeans have of cumbia is another, different, it’s the foreign vision. Something seen from outside not as something of its own, but exotic”says the singer. And is that a criticism?, we ask. “I say that just as a curious thing. The way you appreciate something from the outside, the way you see it. That was what I felt,” she replies.

An issue that inevitably leads to the debate on cultural appropriation. To what extent does a group like Hit La Rosa feed on rhythms and sounds that may be their own or others? “I have felt that everything we touch musically is something we have grown up listening to Lucero warns. At some point there have been things that seemed external to us. Like when someone proposed to start a show with ayahuasca icaros and we said ‘no way’. Or when we hit a lot with African music and one of the guys proposed to do something like that. But in the end it did not prosper because it was still something that did not belong to us. And that shows”.

NEW HORIZONS

Hit La Rosa’s tour of the northern hemisphere will also serve to evaluate a possible career based abroad (as several artists have been doing in recent years). Is staying outside of Peru an option? “It’s going to be a first look at what’s going on outside, how the musician lives, if everything they tell us is true or not (laughs). Let’s see what happens. In general, I try not to have expectations of anything because I think he has done well for me having that mentality. Surprises always come,” says Lucero.

And while they’re on the road, they’re also thinking about what could be their third studio album. “We already have several models that are almost finished. But what happens is that we spend a lot of time fixing the issues”, she says. to follow them