Video premiere: The Tracks, ‘Your Bike’

Kevin Bronson on July 20th, 2022

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The Tracks’ dark, gritty garage-rock resounds with echoes of those who have rocked before — especially artists who have also called their Boyle Heights neighborhood home.

Today, the L.A. quartet — Venancio Bermudez, Felipe Contreras, Juan Santana and Jimmy Conde — continue that history and create a little mystery. The Tracks announce that their sophomore album, “Paredón Blanco” (the historic name of Boyle Heights), will be out July 29. Along with the news comes the film noir video for the album’s closing song, “Your Bike.”

It’s directed by Dylan Dixon and is part of “It Happened on Brooklyn Avenue,” a murder-mystery short film set in East L.A. that will release in September. It stars Angel Lizarraga, Jesus Rodriguez and Jerardo Huitzil, along with the band.

“It takes place in 1959 and portrays a dream that Angel’s character could have had in the short film,” Bermudez says. “He’s one of the prime suspects in the murder mystery ,and in our music video he’s being haunted by ghosts of the past. The Tracks are also ghosts in the film, we’re playing a band that could’ve existed but never did. The film is our way of honoring the past, and the history of East Los Angeles.

“The day of the shoot, I came to talk with the director Dylan Dixon, and somehow we started talking about playing video games. There was a certain video game that came out on PlayStation 3 called ‘L.A. Noire,’ and it was basically a 3D-recreated version of Los Angeles in the 1940s. You could drive around all over L.A., but we noticed that you couldn’t drive into East L.A., you couldn’t drive down 7th Street. It was the only part of the city that was blocked off. What Dylan and I talked about was creating that universe that could’ve been there, East Los Angeles noir. My partner Michelle Payan and I imagined a parallel universe to the film, a story that represents all the untold ones from our neighborhood.”

As for the album, which was produced by Lewis Pesacov and includes the previously released single “Glance,” it’s “kind of like a book to me; each song is like a chapter, I guess,” Bermudez says. “This album was written over the course of 10 years, and each song tells a story from our lives as a band. We’ve taken our time to fine-tune and polish every song.

“Another thing about the album is that Johnny Santana helped write these songs over the years. This is the first album that features him as our guitarist,” he adds. “I’m a big fan of Suicide, the Screamers and Wire, but I listen to all kinds of music from around the world — indigenous folk music, Greek gypsy music, mariachi and soundtracks from movies. I like to channel all these things and combine them together. I’m also heavily inspired by local artists like Willie Herron and Kid Congo Powers. I listen to a lot of music so it’s hard to narrow it down.

||| Watch: The video for “Your Bike”