Chezile

Don’t miss Chezile live at ICA in London this June – tickets on sale now!

Alejandro Sanchez, better known as Chezile, has had the kind of overnight success that would give anyone whiplash. After 2023 psych-pop single “Beanie” went viral on TikTok, giving Sanchez 1.6 million monthly listeners in under two months, he went from living out of his car in Los Angeles to getting calls from labels. A sensitive soul, the Albuquerque-born multi-instrumentalist and child of Mexican regional musicians is now based in San Diego, where he’s hard at work on a full-length debut.

After 47 garnered an audience for a sentimentality melded with reverberated guitar, an austere indie rock caught somewhere between Tame Impala and Cigarettes After Sex, Chezile kept digging inward. Life now forever changed by his circumstance, he centered himself in childhood explorations skateboarding through the desert landscape of New Mexico in Alē. The EP’s self-referential nature sees Chezile’s nickname — pronounced like the skateboard trick — give an underlying warmth to the music, the kind of feeling one would get flipping through a scrapbook years later when, upon reflection, one is living a completely different moment.

“[47] was a tough time of my life,” he says of his last EP. “I think this next project, in comparison, has a lot of elements from my childhood, and tackles trying to deal with the music industry while maintaining that inner child, that little Ale.”

Compared to 47, Alē is a hug rather than an echo of melancholia. The title track and lead single, driven by a piano-run and Chezile’s voice, sees him reminiscing on childhood comforts and struggles, through memories of broken air conditioners and skating through patches of brown grass.