A lot had to go right for Divino Niño to make it here.
When Camilo Medina moved to Miami from Bogota, Colombia, as a 14-year-old, he had no idea he’d run into his childhood friend Javier Forero, who had moved there six years earlier.
Maybe it was fate they both ended up in Chicago for college, where Medina met guitarist Guillermo Rodriguez at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. And good luck that in 2014, after years of playing shows with an electronic drum loop, they found drummer Pierce Codina at what Medina says “was one of the worst shows we ever played” — which he chalks up to a powerful strain of weed that got them way too high.
Now, after years of work, the outfit is set to release their debut album “Foam,” with Winspear Records on June 21. It’s not so much of a stretch to chalk it up to divine circumstance, considering what else could have been.
When they weren’t in school, Medina, guitarist/vocalist, and Forero, bassist/vocalist, spent the bulk of their teen years at the G12 Church in Miami, a bilingual megachurch the two liken to a “Christian cult” and a “pyramid scheme.”
“There are normal churches, and this wasn’t that. This was a pyramid scheme, where the pastor had 12 disciples and those disciples had 12 disciples [and so on],” Medina said. “Every Sunday you give 10% of your salary to the church, but there would be times like twice a year where it would be like ‘the energy of God is asking for everything in your wallet.’
“And then [the church employees] would go in the back and count it and tell the pastor ‘it’s not enough...’ and they would make another round,” Forero said.
“But the good thing is we’ve read the bible twice page to page,” Medina said. “So you can’t tell us we don’t know what’s in the bible,” Forero adds.
The church, founded by Colombian evangelists Cesar and Claudia Castellanos, placed tight restrictions on how the two could spend some of their most formative years. They weren’t allowed girlfriends and they couldn’t listen to anything that wasn’t Christian music. They played in hardcore bands as teens, but their music, by necessity, had to reflect their evangelical surroundings.
“We didn’t get to have that normal teenage angsty period that most people experience,” Medina said.
After 10 years, two album-length demos and a stint in a seven-person Lake View apartment, the music these men make as Divino Niño couldn’t be further removed from the suffocating confines of their upbringing. Even at their most boisterous, the songs on “Foam” feel light and airy throughout, which is why the band wanted to wait until the first day of summer to release it, even though it’s been done for about a year.
“Summer in Chicago is like this beautiful, mythical thing that everyone talks about all winter,” Codina said. “It would have felt weird to release this in January.”
If moods change like seasons, then the album is summer incarnate. Guitars, synths and gentle vocals amble through and among each other in a dreamlike state, reverb flowing through their melodies like blood through arteries. The result is a hazy blend of bilingual bedroom pop and indie rock, shot through with a beachfront charm that has drawn comparisons to Mac Demarco and ’60s surf rock of old, though Divino Niño somewhat bristle at the suggestion.
“We’re not trying to fall within an older tradition, but maybe a tradition that’s starting now,” Codina said. “If you think about [creating music] in those terms, then you’re already too late,” Rodriguez adds.
Some songs, like the swinging, danceable title track, feel like a Montrose Beach day party. Others, like “Melty Caramelo,” evoke a quiet picnic near the Humboldt Park Lagoon, or an equivalent location. Either way, the breeze is palpable and all energy focused on the pleasures of the here and now, winter’s bite both a distant memory and a problem for tomorrow.
The good vibes shining through “Foam” weren’t consciously cultivated, but brought about through the inherent nature of the band members and the people they surround themselves with.
“In general we’re optimistic people,” Medina said. “It’s one of those things that when it comes out, there’s little control over it, but I do think that in this specific time and era, being positive is one of the coolest things you can be. I think it’s important, I don’t think it’s cheesy.”
On the Bandcamp page for “Foam,” Divino Niño thank “our girlfriends...for loving us” and “the amazing Chicago artistic community for inspiring us.” Speaking on the former, Medina describes a blur of days where the band rarely left his Humboldt Park apartment, so busy were they recording the album. His girlfriend had to hear the same songs on what seemed like an endless loop, while the other band members rarely got to see their partners over that time.
“The recording process was kind of crazy and we had to put so much time into it, so the fact that they were so supportive... is something to be spoken about,” Medina said.
The youthful, hopeless romanticism that defines Foam, however, belies the maturity with which Divino Niño approach their craft. They’ve been working on the album since before the 2016 release of their “Shady Sexyfornia Tapes,” but labored through the arduous process of recording and mixing the album mostly by themselves, watching YouTube videos to learn the ins and outs until they had a final product that was to their liking.
“We were learning how to record in not optimal settings. We didn’t want this to just be like a lo-fi album, we wanted it to sound professional,” Codina said. “We wanted this to be the best possible thing we could get out of a bedroom,” Forero adds.
When discussing the city’s art scene that inspired them, Medina says it took awhile for the band to find their people in Chicago, but that once they did it was a “tight community, like a group of friends that are all like-minded.”
That community will share the stage with them on June 21, when Divino Niño celebrate the release of their debut album with a concert at the Empty Bottle (1035 N. Western) in Ukrainian Village, where both Forero and Rodriguez have apartments.
Sharing in the occasion with them will be Valebol (the collaborative project between Vivian McConell of V.V. Lightbody and Daniel Villareal of Dos Santos), indie-rock outfit Girl K and Bunny, the dreamy shoegaze brainchild of Jessica Viscius. DJ Paulcherry69, who helped with production on the album, will be DJing throughout the evening.
As for Divino Niño, they say they have big plans for the show, though they’re still hammering out the finer details.
“It’s going to be a special night,” Medina said.