Los Saints, ascending.

Angel Mariscal had a short-lived stint playing the piano when he was in elementary school. “The teacher would be, like, ‘Play this,’ and then I would want to go outside to play with my friends. So, that didn’t last. After that, it was the acoustic guitar, and I stuck with that.” Eventually, he became so proficient that his teachers basically told him they couldn’t teach him anymore, so he plugged in and started playing electric. He had a cousin: Emiliano Garcia, a drummer who shared his passion for music. “In 2017, we were like, ‘Hey, I play music. You play music. Let’s start a band.’ We kind of did it as a duo. I wrote some songs like ‘Let It Out.’ It wasn’t really until a year or two years after I graduated from high school that I started thinking about being in a band. I just wanted to make music and put it out.”

The first Los Saints singles (the aforementioned “Let It Out” and another song titled “Extraterrestrial”) popped up on the streamers in 2019. At that point, the group was still a duo, and Mariscal, with some help from Garcia, was just dipping his toe into the songwriting seas. Before then, he would simply listen to music on his phone and, as he says, “try to freestyle on my guitar” and record it on his phone. “I was like, ‘This sounds cool; this could be a song.’ But I really started writing music when I joined up with my cousin. He’s the one that taught me, ‘This is what a verse is. This what a chorus is.’ Structural stuff.”

The duo became a trio in late 2019 when Gianluca Exposito joined on lead guitar. Soon after, they were ready to start gigging. “We were gonna have a show as a three-piece,” Mariscal says. “Me as the singer and rhythm guitarist and Emiliano on the drums and Gianluca on the lead guitar. I had made some backing tracks for the bass. We got offered a show. We confirmed it and everything. We were, like, ‘Dude, this is going to be our first show. It’s going to be a sick house show.’ And then it was canceled when Covid came around.”

The three-piece became one of the many local bands that had the performance rug pulled out from under it when the pandemic hit. Their live debut was delayed until they hosted a show on Fiesta Island in August 2021. They played a 20 minute-long set: the two singles and a handful of songs that hadn’t been released yet.

By 2022, they had recorded a self-funded, five-song EP (Welcome to Confusion) that got picked up by Encinitas-based ENCI Records. They started gigging more after the EP garnered some positive accolades from the likes of Under The Radar and Alternative Press. And later that year, the trio started working on the songs that would form their recently released debut LP, Certified.

The album proved to be the swansong for Exposito’s tenure with the band. After the recording was completed, he offered his bandmates a fitting farewell present: his replacement guitarist. “Jorge Vazquez was introduced to us by Gianluca when he was leaving the band,” Mariscal says. “He was in another band called Undead Sunset. When Gianluca brought it up, he was down. This is definitely a permanent setup.”

Another new guy entering the Los Saints (musical) fold is bassist Greg Ortega, an early supporter of the band who also shot a video for their song “Fouund You Somewhere.” “I asked Greg if he wanted to be the bassist for the band. He was like, ‘I’ve never played an instrument before, but I love music, and I love you guys as friends. So, I’ll do it.’ He just picked it up last year and he has been getting down. Playing a show for the first time two months after just picking up the bass takes a lot of courage.”

Mariscal says the band is hoping to tour next year, and just continue writing and recording. “Right now, we just really want to release more music,” he says. “I have been getting my demo songs down, so we have a lot of new stuff ready.”