For Leo Niño, Mexican Summer is as much about where he comes from as it is about where he’s going next.
The psychedelic alternative-rock project of 24-year-old Mexican-American songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Wyatt Reichart, Leo Niño, brings together hazy psychedelia, indie rock, shoegaze, and flashes of Latin influence. Now based in Asheville, North Carolina, Reichart has created a sound that can move between dreamy introspection and the rawer energy of alternative rock.
On Mexican Summer, those influences become the backdrop to something particularly personal.
The album explores Reichart’s experience growing up Mexican American in the South, drawing heavily from summers spent visiting family in Mexico. Those trips left more than memories behind. Recordings from family parties have been woven into some of the songs, bringing pieces of those moments directly into the album and paying tribute to relatives he doesn’t get to see as often as he’d like.
That nostalgia became an important part of the record, but another kind of goodbye was happening while it was being made.
During his final semester of college, Reichart gathered songs he’d written throughout those years and returned to his childhood home. His parents were preparing to sell the house, and it had already been cleared out, so he and some of his closest friends moved their recording equipment in and spent ten days turning the empty property into a temporary studio.
They finished the album there, and afterward, Reichart left his childhood home for the final time.
It’s difficult to imagine a more fitting setting for Mexican Summer. An album about identity, family, and the places that stay with us was captured inside another place he was preparing to leave behind.
The project also arrives with plenty of experience behind Leo Niño. Reichart has played around 100 shows, worked in professional studios with Grammy-nominated engineers, and shared bills with acts including Oso Oso, Sorry Mom and Mustard Service. His first release under the Leo Niño name also reached around 25,000 streams early on.
With Mexican Summer, however, the numbers feel secondary to the story. Leo Niño has taken family parties, summers in Mexico, college years, and one final visit home and preserved pieces of them inside the same record.
It’s nostalgic by nature, but Mexican Summer doesn’t feel stuck in the past. Instead, it sounds like an artist carrying those memories with him into whatever comes next.
https://open.spotify.com/album/7A7pvr5xsCTO3Ha2TnyPVQ?si=0IzmnoHkRGuiHNt329E9pQ
