Brooklyn’s Alejandro Debuts With ‘¡Con Gusto!’

Watch Coney Island-based video for first single ‘Anaheim’ below

October 20, 2026October 20, 2026 Ron Hart 0 Comments ¡Con Gusto!, Alejandro, Alex Silva, Anaheim, Beach Fossils, Brooklyn, Real Estate

Alejandro (Image: Josie Keefe and Jonny Campolo)

The surfy, jangly indie pop vibes of such influences as Real Estate and Beach Fossils inform the sound of Brooklyn’s latest sonic export Alejandro.

The brainchild of singer-songwriter Alex Silva, the group’s debut LP ¡Con Gusto! is what he describes as “me trying to conjure and hold on to these memories that I wasn’t able to form at the time, because I was stressed out or in a weird place.”

That period was 2022, just as the world was easing from the grasp of the COVID-19 pandemic and as his prior band Personal Space was ending. Newly in need of an outlet, he moved away from the math-y leanings of his previous work and reaching toward a more direct and intuitive songwriting mode, starting from the simplest musical ideas, and allowing whatever associations they brought out for him to guide the songs’ development.

“Picking up on the feeling of a piece of music and opening yourself to it, letting it trigger things in you—that’s a skill in itself. That isn’t always how I’ve written, but it’s how I write now,” he says.

Alejandro *¡Con Gusto!*, self-released 2027

According to the Andy Cush-penned press bio, “Silva draws from a broad swath of inspiration: the diaristic directness of Sun Kil Moon and the elliptical narratives of Blood on the Tracks; the theatrical exuberance and subtle harmonic colorations of Prefab Sprout and Scott Walker; the sneaky sophistication of Third Eye Blind, whose songs, Silva points out, are a lot more musically and emotionally complex than their status as ’90s radio chestnuts would have you believe. His own songs are full of tricky rhythms, jazzy chord changes, unreliable narrators, and lyrics that pull the rug out from beneath your assumptions. But ¡Con Gusto! is never ostentatiously elaborate. Most of the time, it’s downright breezy, disguising its compositional ambition and the melancholy or acerbic shades of its writing in musical settings that evoke the beachside locales where several of its stories unfold.”

Silva began writing the songs that would become ¡Con Gusto! in 2022, while his previous band, the math-rock-inflected Personal Space (Tiny Engines), was dissolving. However, he’s since found solace in the group he’s put together to bring Alejandro to life, including drummer Jesse Chevan; bassist and keyboardist Charlie Hack; guitarist Ryan El-Solh (Scree, Office Culture); pedal steel player Luke Bergman (Bill Frissell, Andrew Bird); cornetist Mike Irwin (The Walkmen, Elvis Perkins); and saxophonist Ivan Arteaga. Each musician is an established player on the Brooklyn music scene as the lines between indie rock and indie jazz continue to blur, giving the music a cohesion of familiarity.

Rock & Roll Globe is honored to premiere the Coney Island-based video for the first single off ¡Con Gusto!, entitled “Anaheim,” below.

“(The song is about) the randomness and contingency that define the beginning of a romance and how it all becomes larger than life with the passage of time,” Silva explains of the song. “It’s an ode to the quixotic and improvisatory pursuit of my wife’s affections during a final college spring break in Southern California. A song about being young, cocky and determined to win over a crush.”

¡Con Gusto! comes out in early 2027.