Cromo Rx

With their 2018 debut album, Modo, Puerto Rico’s Epilogio staked out a thoroughly contemporary position within a lineage of Latin psych rock and disco. Founded a few years before, the quartet worked its way from smaller venues to touring Mexico at a time when rock was being eclipsed by Latin trap, standing out in their Geordi La Forge-esque visors and all-white tracksuits. Tracks like “Sonido Infinito,” “Submarina Club,” and “Otro Nivel” channeled inspirations from ’70s Argentine rockers Almendra and Pescado Rabioso alongside dream pop and acid jazz into sleek, subdued funk.

Five years later, the group applies its retro fixations to more ambitious ends with Cromo Rx, a concept album about a special pill that lulls those who take it into a deep slumber filled with fantastical dreams. They lean into the setup with aplomb, using it to alchemize sounds and genres: bolero interludes sandwiched between surf-rock riffs; glam-metal guitar hooks and echoes of ’80s new wave that segue into somber emo.

Following the expository “La Pastilla de Tus Sueños, Pt. 1” (“The Pill of Your Dreams, Pt. 1”), the horn fanfare of “Pirámide” kicks off the sojourn with a fusion of indie rock and electric sitar, courtesy of Peré Oudav. Peppered with references to heat, mirages, and pyramids, the song evokes a trippy desert landscape, an idea underlined by the René Laloux-inspired visuals of its music video. From that setting they shift to the pastoral ’60s harmonies of “Hangar,” whose folksy twangs make it easy to picture Epilogio performing from a quaint fairgrounds gazebo. “12AM,” in contrast, harnesses arena-rock energy with crisp drums and bluesy guitar licks before morphing into a sleek, Tame Impala-esque shuffle that underlines guitarist Marco Torres’ breezy croon.

Epilogio have been releasing the bulk of Cromo Rx’s tracks as singles for a year now, and fittingly, the album feels like a collection of A-sides. “Circuito por Milán” and “Platicar” are tailor-made to kill live, so much so that they re-recorded the latter to include an extended jam they’d been tacking on at the end in concert. The ethereal "Molecular" marries funky wah-wah with chillout, while the solemn “Los Cuervos”—with guest vocals from Chango Menas, of the now-disbanded group Índigo—pulls back the sheet and confirms what’s really gnawing at Epilogio’s melancholy: heartbreak, of course, as ever. It’s all fun and games until you remember what you’re trying to run away from. Beneath fanciful lyrics sketching out the album’s dream world—filled with explorers, race car drivers, secret agents, and spacemen—lurks an underlying angst: These are adventures meant for two.

Concept albums can be a risky proposition, but Epilogio make good use of Cromo Rx’s expanded imaginative bandwidth. As they travel from dream to dream, the band revels in exhilarating moods while grappling with the lovelorn feelings that loom over the fits of joy. Whereas Modo was an “instruction manual” to overcoming heartbreak, here they bring a more outlandish approach to similar subject matter. The sound of the record is so lively and varied that the album’s conceptual Macguffin might not even have been necessary. But Epilogio’s creative swing helps show off the breadth of their musicality and their increasingly sharp lyrics. As rock en español oscillates between indulging in saccharine pop and retreating to harder-edged corners of alternative and metal, Epilogio show that there’s another path to be found in tapping the nostalgic sounds of decades past and reshaping them into a narrative that hits all its emotional beats.