Los Premios win all the prizes at Heaven Can Wait on Saturday, 9 March 2024.

Niño Disco, airu, and Reme sandwich the four-stack bill for a Viernes Gigante.

The New Colossus Festival played out from March 6-10, highlighting new sounds in underground music from here, there, and all points foreign and abroad.

New York City is a destination that international acts are going to set their sights on regardless. But the stakes were raised as the fest has fit itself snugly into the week before SXSW, attracting bands from all over who wanted to hopscotch through town on their way to more storied Texas festival.

The fledgling festival wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, and you wouldn’t either, trading between showcases at dives and clubs dotting an electric neighborhood in one of the most exciting cities in the world. Sights, sounds, food, drink, and lodging if you can afford it.

Let’s go see some music!

Heaven Can Wait is located a little bit north of the bulk of New Colossus venues. By that we mean a 10-minute walk. A grave ordeal that would put most music journalists six feet under. But not the hale and hearty crew at Hump Day News. Visitors to the club at 169 Avenue A enjoyed a dreamy night of indie rock organized by The Spanish Wave showcases.

Country-specific showcases at festivals are lackluster when it’s just a room full of the regular locals scoping out a few sleep-deprived bands, fresh off a long journey by plane, train, or automobile. You want the real deal; a room full of foreign nationals representing their country in every aspect of the music industry, from artists, to agents, to promoters, to bookers, to roadies, to the hanger ons.

That’s what we got at The Spanish Wave, a room full of paisanos, and it was glorious.

Three out of four acts on the bill were from Spain, or at least the Iberian Peninsula. The fourth act was a local wildcard, with roots in Ecuador.

Like Meatloaf never said: “Three out of four ain’t bad.”

Four-piece? Or is Reme a five-piece? Hard to tell, there was so much equipment stacked on top of the postage stamp-sized stage at Heaven Can Wait. Small stage, yes, though the semi-circular platform offered the crowd a good chance to see about 270 degrees of the musicians at work. Not quite theatre-in-the-round, but more than halfway there. The band impressed with a twin keyboardist attack that pitted the keymen face-to-face like dueling pianists out of a Looney Tunes sketch. Spanish Wave or not, strong Britpop vibrations emanating off this outfit.

The band announced itself as a Basque band, out of Bilbao, which gives you a preliminary sense of the complicated waters that artists swim through when a separatist band plays a nationalist showcase. But like Phillip Jeffries of Twin Peaks said, with more than an air of mystery: “We live inside a dream.” And who knows which flag will be raised up the flagpole when we wake? The indie rockers played more than a few tracks off their latest full-length Con lo bueno y con pena, a dream pop delight.

Straight outta Valencia (and sharing the drummer for Yo Diablo), it’s Los Premios. A psych rock quartet that can throw a few proggy hand grenades into an otherwise pop-forward mix. The band draws a crowd, and life at Heaven Can Wait was shoulder-to-shoulder club living. But the youth culture in Spain starts hitting the club scene before most of their American counterparts can apply for their learning permit. A packed club is like a green pasture for this crowd.

Niño Disco is neither Spanish, nor Basque, nor any other option off the Iberian Peninsula. The disco artist is a NYC local with Ecuadorian roots. After centuries of colonial rule, though, the least Spain could do is offer the artistic sons and daughters of The Country of Four Worlds the closing slot of the showcase. Roger Cabrera, the man behind the moniker, did not disappoint the late crowd.

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