Meet alegrías, one of KCRW’s featured musical groups for the Young Creators Project.
Meet alegrías, one of KCRW’s featured musical groups for the Young Creators Project.
Photo courtesy of the artist.

Young Creators Project spotlight: alegrías

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San Diego’s alegrías have a perfect meet cute origin story, finding each other via UC San Diego’s Musicians’ Club. The on-campus club, according to alegrías’ guitarist Luke Hoeg is, “organized by a group of students who are wanting to start bands and stuff. Basically, a place to get people together for listening parties, and forming connections with each other so that we can all jam out.” 

The four students immediately clicked (Hoeg, and the band’s de-facto leader, singer, and cellist Azalea Segura-Mora already knew each other from high school). Ada Ngozi (bass), and Daniel Hernandez (drums) round out the group for a lived-in chemistry that belies the relatively brief amount of time they’ve been together. The result is rich, loose layers of indie rock-meets-R&B rhythms above which lilting jazz vocals and string melodies take hold. 

“Alegrías'' is Spanish for multiple joys. So [the music we make under that name] is really energetic and happy.” Segura-Mora explains.

More: Today’s Top Tune: alegrías - “Steal My Heart”

Having been involved in orchestras dating back to her time in middle school, Segura-Mora has developed quite the prowess with her instrument of choice, the cello. Its presence in alegrías’ songs lend an immediate sense of heft and undeniable cool factor.

The tunes also convey the sense of joyfulness that the band’s name would suggest. Even when they are grappling with (in the case of YCP song submission “Steal My Heart”) the aftermath of “a messy social situation [Segura-Mora] went through.” And a penchant for shifting seamlessly between English and Spanish proves to be just another one of the group's many selling points.

All four members joined Anne Litt recently over Zoom to go deep on their origin story and plot out their dream collaborations with the likes of KCRW favorites Chicano Batman, Esperanza Spalding, Anderson .Paak, and John Mayer.

More:
Young Creators Spotlight: Taty
Young Creators Spotlight: Ruler of Program
Young Creators Spotlight: Ras
Young Creators Spotlight: Magnus Ferrell
Young Creators Spotlight: Madam Bombs

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