Magnet / Mind by L.A.'s Balto tells midnight stories drenched in rock and roll and greasy Diner food

"Hollywood your faded charms linger in my lover's eyes"

Magnet / Mind by Los Angeles band and night lifers Balto has a sound steeped in a musician's life: unpredictable side journeys and hustles, rolling with the punches, getting actually punched, late night heavenly diner food and the inhabitants of the night itself, the highs (intoxicants and not) and the lows (intoxicants and not) all drenched in a Southern Cali garden rock / desert rock vibe with the same D.N.A as the 60's Laurel Canyon sound, a car crash of the hippy, surfer, vagabond, doper, artist, dreamer. Magnet / Mind's lyrics alone are worth the price of admission rolling so exquisitely off of their tongues and like road worn poetry full of truth and love framed within their carefree music makes it so damn heavenly. 

FROM BALTO: A long, strange 3am trip from Vermont to Cahuenga down Santa Monica ended at an all-night diner just before morning. I found myself thinking about a particularly perfect Neil Young song from the early 90s, and that led me to what the song revealed itself to be about - quixotic idealism, mental health, and, hopefully, the subconscious outlasting the conscious in love.

The track represents of a collaboration between the band and several friends - engineered by Riley Geare (Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Caroline Rose) and mixed by Sean O'Brien (Moses Sumney, Matt Berninger).
-Robb Donker Curtius



THE FACTS AS WE KNOW THEM - PRESS NOTES:

Balto is a rock’n’roll group from Los Angeles - groovy and exuberant, boozy and tight; a working band that has honed its sound over the better part of 8 years through the sweatiest dive-bars and clubs on three continents. The long nights, hard breaks, and unexpected joys of that life are all there in the music - in the poignant, quiet moments where songs simmer down to their bones and in the feverish emotionality of the big lifts. They’re lived-in songs, meant to be felt in person and danced to - all heart, blood, guts, hips, shoulders.

Over the last several years Balto has played hundreds of shows all over the USA, Continental Europe, and Russia, performing at festivals such as SXSW, Timber!, PDX Pop Now, and Echo Park Rising. They’ve supported heavyweight bands such as The Revivalists, Houndmouth, Blind Pilot, Low Cut Connie, and others up and down the West Coast and had songs featured by Spotify, Tidal, American Songwriter, Relix, and Consequence of Sound. Of the band’s recent release. Black Snake, Mojave Blues, Rolling Stone wrote, “Sound[s] like the twisted soundtrack to some 1960s beach party movie, this punky garage-rocker skewers the hedonism and hollowness of Los Angeles.”