Exploring the Unconventional Fusion of Cumbia, Rock, and Punk with Ilan Amores
Among the narrow streets of Sevilla’s Casco Antiguo, surrounded by ochre buildings with hints of yellow, Ilan Amores, a Buenos Aires native born in 1992, pulls out a small digital camera from his pocket and starts filming. “Say hello,” he smiles, capturing the moment. The silver, worn Canon camera has accompanied him since his first tour with the Argentine punk band, Argies. “I bought it at a market in Italy many years ago, and since then, I record everything, wherever I go. Memories are preserved better with the camera,” he muses as he strums his guitar, heading toward the bohemian Alameda de Hércules.
“I am in a state of happiness that I think is unnatural for human beings,” he admits. This sentiment is understandable, as Amores finds himself in Spain, about to embark on his first solo European tour. Just last week, he traveled in a tour van with his idol, Manu Chao, and over the weekend, he performed “Bar La Perla” alongside his compatriot Gaspi at La Velada del Año V in the Estadio de La Cartuja, serenading an audience of about 80,000 people. “The experience with Manu was a complete surprise. I didn’t even know what La Velada was until two weeks ago. An artist’s life is very pirate-like and buccaneer… until things start to go well.”
Amores’ musical proposal defies categorization, merging traditionally sectarian genres into an unexpected marriage of cumbia, rock, and punk—the latter being one of his most vital roots. The outcome is a deeply emotional and dense cumbia that blends the Monterrey style with the villera sound of suburban Buenos Aires.
“There’s a stigma attached to cumbia and punk, as if those two genres shouldn’t intersect. They’re like forbidden loves,” he explains. “But then I thought that the most punk thing you could do was to cross that boundary. You can’t escape cumbia; it’s part of our DNA in Latin America. There comes a time when, as a musician, you get fed up not understanding it. It has its own language and musical richness, and I said, ‘I want to learn that.’”
So where does this passion for punk originate? “In Misiones, the city where I grew up, I had a neighbor named El Naipe. He was a crazy kid: he had tattoos, played drums, and listened to punk,” he recounts. “He gave me some cassettes with The Clash, Die Toten Hosen, and the Ramones. It was the coolest thing in the world, but also music that invited you to be a part of it. It resonates well with the rebelliousness of a child feeling like the entire world is against them. He introduced me to a whole reality and a social consciousness, and that’s how I became very close to punk,” explains Amores, who had already been playing guitar and drums from a young age.
It’s no surprise, then, that he soon became involved in bands. He started with Euforia, which lasted “two rehearsals.” Following this were Anarquía, formed with friends when he was about 13 or 14, and later Cara Rota, which was more serious. “Misiones was a good place to rehearse dreams,” says Amores, who later returned to Buenos Aires to study drums. There, he would join Argies as their bassist, a band that would take him around the world and shape his visceral perspective on music.
However, his path shifted when he discovered the power of songwriting as a narrative tool: “One day I heard Andrés Calamaro, and I realized what it meant to write a song.” Alongside Chao and Calamaro, his inspirations include Pete Doherty and Joaquín Sabina. “I really like the imagery of the singer—half poet, cursed, pirate, buccaneer. All these people take their role as a singer very seriously, just as I do.”
Between questions, he strums a few chords on the guitar resting in his lap. At one point, he begins playing “Bar La Perla,” attracting the attention of a waiter from the café who pops out to listen. His rock aesthetic contrasts sharply with the delicacy that emerges as he plucks the strings of his Gibson. The tattoos etched on his skin serve as ink through which his experiences are documented, from which the lyrics of his songs now flow.
In 2017, he released his first solo album, UNO, followed by Chico Chico in 2019, during which he also adopted that name as a new artistic identity. “When I started as a solo artist, I didn’t want to put my own skin on it; I wanted to hide behind something,” he admits. Chico Chico, he explains, originated from a bar in a village in Corrientes, where he went to record the album. “We recorded in a wooden cabin, with the microphone hanging from the ceiling, next to the beach. After asking for inspiration from [the pagan saint] Gauchito Gil upon entering the town, I wrote the whole album that weekend, surrounded by friends,” he recalls. There was “a lousy little bar called Chico Chico, and a friend said, ‘Call the album that name.’ Soon enough, they started calling me Chico Chico.”
The album was released, and a year later, someone from the village contacted him to share that Chico Chico had actually been a beloved local fishing man and musician who had passed away. “His brother opened the bar in his name. They said his spirit was in the river where we wrote the songs,” he reminisces.
However, it was time to shed the mask—there was a Brazilian artist with the same name—and present himself to the world as Ilan Amores, despite his reservations: “I don’t want to imagine that so many people could know me, because you start trying to please everyone, and that’s a very bad ship to board.”
Although he gained new followers over the weekend, Amores is not interested in sacrificing his essence for visibility. “I take very seriously everything I worked on to get to this moment, to not renounce it, while maintaining a spirit and trying to be authentic,” he conveys, radiating the good vibes he is known for. “Cumbia accompanies me, cumbia cares for me, and this high boat will take me to a good port.”