Balto

California Rock ‘N Roll quartet Balto makes timeless, bone shaking songs - attitude and groove, joy and ferocity. They are the kind of band that is unafraid to bleed for their craft. Card-Carrying cultists of the Great American Song, the Great American Groove, and the Great American Highway.

A band of young, lifelong working musicians with thousands of shows between them - Sheldon Reed, pounding his drums, face contorting with concentration, occasional Jarrett-like moan escaping into the overhead microphones. Mr. Adam Ditt on the bass guitar, waist-length hair swaying, fingers skating on the lower frets, sounding like The Who’s John Entwistle after a decade of peyote-fueled wanderings in the Sonoran Desert. Tristan Lake Leabu, long limbs askew, infectiously joyous, eminently maximal, jumping between the twin necks of a big SG. Dan Sheron, right hand bleeding on a telecaster, blowing his voice out on one more song before the night is through.

Returning from the lockdowns and thrust back into the chaos of the world, a grip of new music will be released throughout the rest of 2022 and 2023. The band has spent the last year recording at the studios of Riley Geare (Unknown Mortal Orchestra, La Luz, Caroline Rose) and Kim Bullard (Elton John, Yes, Santana), as well as their home studio. The tracks have been mixed by Sean O’Brien (Matt Berninger, Moses Sumney) and mastered by Howie Weinberg (Nirvana, Beastie Boys, Herbie Hancock). The upcoming album feels like a culmination of the band’s ambitions as recording artists - to fuse the vulnerable, raw realism of Sheron’s songs with evocative, impressionist arranging and tremendous performances by the band. Echoes of the British Invasion, and driving rhythms of the American Swamp tangle with the biting anxiety of Zevon, that satisfying hookiness of Petty, contemporary sonic ambitions of Jim James and Brittany Howard, and the urgency of Big Star, on an album that explores the absurdity of living in the decline.