Listen to Panda Bear & Sonic Boom’s New Reset Mariachi EP

In August 2022, Panda Bear and Sonic Boom released the collaborative LP Reset. Later that year, in November, they shared an expanded edition of the album. Then, in August 2023, they dropped the Reset in Dub remix edition, which they made with Adrian Sherwood. Now, the musicians have shared “the final chapter in the Reset story”: the six-song Reset Mariachi EP. Hear it, and find two new videos, below.

The new EP features Spanish-language versions of “Danger” and “Livin’ in the After.” The artists made the new tracks, as well as a new take on “Songbook,” with the Mexico City group Mariachi 2000 de Cutberto Pérez.

In a lengthy statement about Reset Mariachi, Sonic Boom said:

The final chapter in the Reset story.

We had the idea to record with a Mexican mariachi party band going back to “Tropic of Cancer” from the Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper LP, but it was always just a pipe dream and circumstances never came together.

Then last year, knowing we were shortly to head to Mexico for a show, we asked our Mexican friend & sound tech Oswaldo Terrones if he had contacts with any mariachi in Mexico. He did… and also with a studio specializing in mariachi recording. With that burning a hole in our imaginations we pulled together a six person team of three Mexican and three Spanish friends, here in Portugal and in Mexico City, and painstakingly translated two Reset songs, making sure to be true to the poetry, the Mexican Spanish, the rhymes, and, of course, the rhythmic flow.

In November ’23 we recorded them at Topetitud Studio in Coyoacan, Mexico City, with additional arranging by Santiago and Patsi Mijare, with the mariachi playing the instruments, us playing the percussion, and all taking turns to sing. Our Spanish didn’t enable us to understand their animated chatting, but we were told afterwards that the mariachi loved the songs and were bemused by their simplicity and the apparent sleight of hand in their construction. It was a great day, and a joy to watch the mariachi enjoying the songs and taking them back home.

Read about the original Reset’s “Edge of the Edge” in “The 100 Best Songs of 2022.”