Los Yesterdays are a Chicano soul band based around the creative collaboration between Gabriel Rowland and Victor Benavides. The Los Angeles duo make their 2024 debut with their album, Frozen in Time.

They began working together when Rowland – a drummer by trade, then creaky and exhausted from waking up at dawn to work construction – decided to channel those struggles into song. He contacted Benavides, a former bandmate of Rowland’s deceased brother, to record the soul ballads that Southland Chicanos call “oldies,” the best of Black American sweet soul music from the 60s, 70s and early 80s.

The Chicano obsession with soul music began in the mid 1950s, when young Chicanos, many of whom were first-generation immigrants raised on their parents’ mariachi and norteño records, were searching for a music of their own. They began in the smog-spitting gas guzzlers and carpeted living rooms and shoe-melting playground blacktop of the 1970s.

On songs like “Love Is A Game For Fools” and surprise TikTok hit “Nobody’s Clown,” Los Yesterdays filter love-struck R&B crooning through guitar-strumming Mexican balladeering; the result is something that sounds like the Los Angeles of yesterday and today.