Pitchfork London 2026: Los Thuthanaka

Los Thuthanaka’s self-titled 2025 album might’ve taken the Pitchfork album of the year title and garnered much online praise, but it’s live where this music makes sense for me. On record, the album can feel like an overstimulating assault on the ears when juxtaposed against the construct of the Western world all around us and its need to conceptualise. In person, it’s a whole-body experience that envelopes you in feelings and emotions rather than thoughts.

US-based siblings Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton eschew the production ideals of their adopted home, combining the 21st-century digital with the timeless Aymaran cosmological. Not so much expanding our conceptual boundaries of music but interrogating the very taxonomical hierarchies through which colonial thought divided and categorised the world. The Aymara people, whose population today stretches across other imposed boundaries — the modern-day nation states of Peru, Chile, Argentina and Bolivia — long predate the Europeans and Inca in this region.

The opening of ‘Huayño “Phuju”’ (English translation: ‘Spring Fount’) is all jittery samples, as if local radio is hissing — still carrying the cosmic background radiation of the Big Bang — distorted through the underpowered speakers of a colourful bus climbing an Andean pass, carrying us all onto the Altiplano. Suddenly, we are engulfed by a wall of sound, as though by the howl of the dusty plateau wind.

The duo, wearing outfits in traditional patterns of the Pakajaqi Nation, attempt to “recreate the cacophony of the first aurora and the scream of our star” (Chuquimamani-Condori) through samples, keytar, electronics and rich looped guitar riffs that guide the subconscious mind through the feedback. There is an almost unfathomable amount of texture hidden within. Tempos swirl and dissipate like eddies on the surface of a powerful deep-flowing river, yet Los Thuthanaka somehow navigate this inherent chaos by accepting, rather than fighting, entropy.

Some of the instruments might be modern but Chuquimamani-Condori states that the music is “older than us and older than the state’s folklorisation, older than the origin stories the occupying powers created for them.” It is rooted in the Andean “cosmovision” represented by the patchwork of the Wiphala flag held aloft by the siblings between songs. The colourful seven-by-seven emblem represents in equal parts: energy (yellow); natural resources (green); society and culture (orange); the cosmos (blue); the earth (red); and self-determination (violet); all cut through by a diagonal of white squares symbolising time and change. The album is dedicated to the Aymaran celestial deity Chuqichinchay — an androgynous feline who protects queer people, tellingly painted in “all the colours.” Everything happens all at once and exists at the intersection of modern decolonialism with traditional Aymaran expressions of diversity.

Taking cues from ancestors and their sonic ceremonies, you’ll often hear a whole different set of influences to a beat you hadn’t even noticed until then within the trance-like soundscape. You’re never completely sure whether these are new elements that have crept up on you, or you’re just learning to listen differently as Aymaran non-linear time takes hold. Perhaps the song always sounded like this? This is what psychedelia thinks it is. Time is motion.

The red lighting and thick smoke in the venue almost obscure Chuquimamani-Condori and Chuquimia Crampton playing in the centre of the dancefloor rather than on the conventional stage. As closing track ‘Kullawada “Awila”’ (‘Queer Grandma’) takes hold, it’s as if the immense sound is rising from an Andean volcano. A cataclysmic eruption from the centre of Earth, nature itself as one with indigenous anti-colonialist resistance, creating the conditions for new life just as it always has. Los Thuthanaka’s hyper-huayño grounds devotees in a collective sense of present-tense euphoria.