Tucson band Sur Block has played the regular hometown haunts from Club Congress to the Rialto Theatre.
But this weekend, they will play before the biggest audience of their five-year career when they stand on the stage for the third annual Dusk Music Festival.
“This will be our biggest show, and that’s how we are treating it,” said an excited Peter “Pops” Yucupicio, the band’s founder and principal songwriter. “But for every show, we attack it as if it was our biggest show.”
“I feel like we’re going to get a lot of people there who will have no idea who we are, and that’s exactly what we want, fresh ears,” added bass player Nick Murray, who is a videographer for the Arizona Daily Star.
Yucupicio’s band, which in addition to Murray includes Alyssa Sandoval, Ricardo Bracamonte and Riley Lane, opens the festival on Saturday, Nov. 10, at downtown’s Armory Park. The crowd is expected to number in the thousands.
Sur Block, which takes its name from Yucupicio’s rough-and-tumble Old Pasqua neighborhood on Tucson’s west side, performs a hybrid of desert indie pop that borrows from electronica and pulses with sublime melodic vocal harmonies. Yucupicio, son of the longtime Pasqua Yaqui tribal Chairman Peter Yucupicio, prefers to describe their sound as a blend of different cultures and inspirations. Instrumentation that can lean on the metal side, with brooding synthesizers and crunchy guitars, contrasts the often dark and sometimes raw lyrics that draw from street life in Yucupicio’s neighborhood. Topics include violence, drugs and financial despair.
“There’s a bit of duality when some of our songs lyrically are kind of grotesque, but Alyssa’s singing it is very pretty,” he said, calling some of the sentiments in his songs brutally honest and harsh.
Yucupicio, 28, started Sur Block after Bracamonte suggested that the pair do something together musically. He spent a year learning the ins-and-outs of the synthesizer — he also plays guitar — before diving in with Sandoval on vocals. They brought in Lane and then Murray to round out their sound.
Sur Block, which has recorded an EP, initially played whatever gigs they could get. But a while ago the band members decided to rethink their strategy. They wanted to shoot for bigger shows and fewer of them, and they wanted to play new venues; the fear was that they were over-saturating their audiences, Yucupicio and Murray said.
“We’re at a point in our music career where we can be a little bit more picky and create shows that will be more special for us as a band and our fans,” said Yucupicio, who is weeks away from launching a Tucson food truck that will specialize in Nashville-style hot chicken. “We’ve gotten to a point where we’re going to be more selective in our shows and start throwing shows for ourselves two or three times a year.”
Murray, 30, said the band is excited to be sharing the Dusk stage with nationally known acts including platinum-selling DJ Dillon Francis and international superstar Jai Wolf.
“We don’t know what time we’re playing,” Murray said days before the schedule was released. “Maybe they will sandwich us in between someone. Whatever we get, we’re super grateful for.”
