Light Up the Lawn: Making Movies

Making Movies is a band that makes American music with an asterisk: because their sound encompasses the entirety of the Americas. It’s through this broader perspective that Making Movies crunches classic rock into Latin American rhythms — African-derived percussion and styles like rumba, merengue, mambo and cumbia — in a way that feels oddly familiar yet delivers the invigorating chills of hearing something singularly special.
​​Over the course of their career, the quartet has turned heads as a newcomer on NPR’s “Tiny Desk Concerts” (with “A La Deriva”), a voice for immigrant rights (with “I Am Another You” which reached No. 3 on Billboard’s Latin Pop Album chart) and as a co-writer alongside salsa icon Rubén Blades (with the Latin Grammy nominated song “No Te Calles”).
The band employs a standard rock lineup of guitar/bass/drums/percussion, but members also incorporate synthesizers, effects pedals and indigenous instruments from Latin America into their music.  They interweave styles as divergent as cumbia and blues, salsa and soul, Cuban son and rock’n’roll––all boiled down into their own original sound.
Making Movies has toured extensively, appearing with the likes of Arcade Fire, Rubén Blades, Los Lobos, Hurray For the Riff Raff, Bomba Estereo, Galactic, Flor De Toloache and Thievery Corporation. The band’s fourth album will be released summer 2022 on the L.A.-based label Cósmica Artists.