Los Retros - Looking Back (LP) - Pink/Yellow/Green Tri-Color Vinyl

Los Retros has always felt like a best-kept secret passed from friend to friend, the sort of artist you hear once and immediately want to play for someone you care about. Looking Back, released in late 2023 on Stones Throw Records, plays into that feeling with a set that digs into Mauri Tapia’s teenage recordings from Oxnard and dusts them off with care. It is not a glossy reinvention. It is a gentle time capsule, and it ends up being his most cohesive long-player so far precisely because it leans into the homespun charm that made his early uploads turn heads in the first place.

If you came in through the 2019 Retrospect EP and its breakout single Someone To Spend Time With, you already know the palette. Chiming guitars that feel like they were tracked in a quiet back room. Woozy keys and rubbery bass. Steady, unhurried drum patterns that make space rather than chase a groove. Looking Back commits to that world from the opening seconds and rarely strays. The songs are compact and direct, almost diary-like, with melodies that settle in quickly and details that surface on repeat plays. You can hear the Oxnard bedroom at every turn, but what sticks is how sure-handed it all feels for music he made while still a teenager. He plays most of the instruments himself and stacks harmonies with an instinct that suggests he has spent long hours absorbing old Latin ballads and soft-rock deep cuts, then filtering them through his own gentle sensibility.

What makes the record land is its tone. There is a sweetness that never tips into syrup, a quiet melancholy that never drags. He writes about time, distance and small moments with the same soft focus you’d get from a sun-bleached family photo. The production keeps that mood intact. Guitars are slightly detuned in places, keys wobble just enough, tape hiss sits like a low tide under everything. These aren’t studio tricks so much as the fingerprint of someone learning by doing, and it gives the album a lived-in texture that a lot of modern indie soul tries to fake. Here it just is.

Context helps. Tapia hails from Oxnard, a coastal town with a deep DIY lineage, and he signed to Stones Throw while still very young. After Retrospect came Everlasting in 2020, a step forward that still kept the home-recorded intimacy. Looking Back lets you draw a line back to where that voice formed. You can hear the pull of 70s Latin American romantica, a bit of vintage soul, a touch of West Coast soft psych. He has talked about making music at home on his own, and the way he layers parts here backs that up. Nothing feels overthought, yet the arrangements always find a small flourish to carry a chorus or bridge. A flicker of organ, a harmony that sneaks in at the end of a phrase, a bass run that answers the vocal.

This is also the Los Retros album that finally feels built for a long listen rather than the quick hit of a single. The sequencing is tidy and the pacing is patient. If you put Looking Back vinyl on at home while making dinner, you’ll find yourself flipping the side without noticing you’ve reached the runout. There is a through line in the keys tone and drum machine patter that makes it play like a late afternoon drive, the kind where the light changes but the road stays the same. That is not to say it is flat. He knows when to push the tempo or lean into a hook, and he is smart enough to get out before ideas overstay their welcome.

It is easy to recommend this to anyone who likes their indie with a tender streak. If you collect Los Retros albums on vinyl, this sits neatly next to Retrospect and Everlasting, rounding out the story of his early years. And if you are hunting for Los Retros vinyl for the first time, this is a lovely front door. The warmth of these mixes really shows on wax, the little imperfections reading as personality rather than artefact. You could buy Los Retros records online without a second thought, but it also feels like the kind of title you’d spot in a Melbourne record store on a rainy Saturday, filed near other sun-faded dreamers, waiting to be taken home. For anyone crate-digging through vinyl records Australia wide and wanting something tender, melodic and quietly addictive, Looking Back is the one you’ll keep reaching for. It is a postcard from the past that still knows how to speak to now.