Listening to Chuquimamani-Condori bombard Faith Hill’s “Breathe” with kullawada drums and meteoric explosions, drowning that pleasant Y2K-era country-pop song in an apocalypse of supernova bursts and charred alien remnants falling to earth, a flood of memories came rushing back: standing in Target with my parents, watching dozens of identical Faith Hills mouth the words from the rack of TV displays. Yet, as all artists should, Chuquimamani-Condori has bigger fish to fry than whether or not you relate to them. It’s not a stretch to wonder if Alborada’s supremely cheesy pan-global New Age hit “Ananau,” which also gets its guts spilled on their recent 100-minute compilation Edits, triggers something in the Bolivian-American’s mind akin to how I feel hearing the Faith Hill song. But to generate emotion via the Barnum effect is child’s play. To make music that sounds like it was ripped straight out of your soul, to grab the listener by the collar and demand you feel exactly what you’re feeling right now — that takes work, and guts, and Chuqimamani-Condori has proven again and again that they have both.

Can you think of anything else that sustains an emotional peak for as long as Chuquimamani-Condori can? How about a wedding? The artist just got married to their partner Travis and celebrated by dropping a mix, Chuqi Chinchay is God (ILY Travis). It’s the latest in a long series of mixes that are as fulfilling as many of their albums, and some of whose oddball and far-flung remixes serious fans will recognize on Edits. The tone of the music is relentlessly celebratory, but because Chuquimamani-Condori builds the music mostly out of the bro-country and mainstream pop they might encounter on the radio, we get the sense it’s celebratory in a more workaday way than triumphal fanfares like Demon City‘s “Esposas 2013” or Los Thuthanaka‘s “Sariri Tunupa” – tracks that exalt Indigenous resistance and sound like the trumpets of justice bearing down on the colonial institutions and shaking their foundations.

Chuquimamani-Condori, born in Riverside, CA and based in Nashville, has long exalted things that stand outside of coastal definitions of cool, starting with when they filmed monster trucks catching fire to the bluesy strains of Bonnie Raitt’s voice on “Fire Gut.” They were early to the poptimism thing, editing Bieber and interpolating Rihanna a few years before Auto-Tune became an inextricable part of the noisenik’s toolkit. There’s novelty in stripping country crooner Parker McCollum down to just his voice and enlisting their shredder brother Joshua to slather the mix in scathing drone guitar in lieu of drums, but it’s easier to get used to Chuquimamani-Condori’s music when you attune yourself to the idea that nothing in their music is ironic (that helps the sampled Lil Jon brays on 2015’s American Drift go down a little easier).

A funny thing happens as you listen to Edits: After an hour or so, it just scans as ordinary pop music. Maybe that’s the sensation Chuquimamani-Condori wanted to avoid in setting most of their prior works at a half hour or less. One of American Drift‘s strengths was how much it managed to fit into just four tracks, and the self-titled Elysia Crampton from 2018 clocked in at only 18 minutes. The short runtimes and difficulty of finding their music on streaming (Spots y Escupitajo essentially no longer exists) added to a feeling of scarcity and exclusivity that, capitalist Pavlovianism be damned, actually made their music feel kind of special. For a while each new release from the Crampton camp felt like Brian Wilson giving us a new Smile.

When Chuquimamani-Condori inaugurated their current name in earnest on 2023’s DJ E, it seemed like the most potent distillation of their patented brew thus far: 30 minutes of uninterrupted peak, throwing Tom and Jerry slapstick effects and DJ tags and vast swaths of sine-wave miasma at us like the world’s most purifying bullet-hell video game. Does the abundance of new material since — not just Edits, which repurposes a lot of DJ E, but a slew of mixes and an hour-plus record with their brother as Los Thuthanaka that arguably blowsDJ E out of the water — dilute the power of that record? Arguably, yes, but not because DJ E isn’t a strong enough record to support the extra weight so much as that you could prune half an hour at random from any of Chuquimamani-Condori’s recent records and have a release of comparable quality.

Not that pruning is really an option with this music. Sure, you could reshuffle the tracks on your iPhone playlist or whatever, but what kind of monster would do that? One of the things I respect the most about Chuquimamani-Condori’s music is how anti-streaming it is, not just in its exclusivity to Bandcamp and physical media but in its rejection of the idea that music is a lifestyle accoutrement to listen to passively in an unobtrusive stream of autoplay while brainstorming app ideas or doing yoga. (Listening to this stuff while wandering San Francisco’s bloodless tech enclave Mission Bay made me feel like Joshua surveying the walls of Jericho.)

By refusing to master their music and keeping its seams and into-the-red eruptions intact, Chuquimamani-Condori has disentangled their music from anything anyone is likely to play before, or after, one of their songs. It cannot fit into an uninterrupted stream. And in its surfeit of feeling, it fights tooth and nail against all of the weird anti-art qualities we’ve begun to attach to music in the 21st century: the idea of music as such a passive art form that it doesn’t even matter if it’s made by AI or not, the idea that good music is whatever you “relate” to and that no one or nothing else is worth your empathy.

I mentioned an hour-long album earlier. Good Lord, what an album. When I first queued up Los Thuthanaka, I made it a full 24 seconds before the sampled diva came in and I decided that I just wasn’t ready for it. Reviewing the Japanese weeper Sansho The Bailiff, the critic Anthony Lane discussed his refusal to see it again, not because he disliked it but because “the human heart was not designed to weather such an ordeal.” I thought that at first hearing Los Thuthanaka, and between its unrelentingness and the labyrinthine structural and textural expanses of its tracks (most of which clock in around six to eight minutes), I felt a sense of overstimulation on first listen that I read as dislike. On the second time around, I got oriented within its own structure and was unburdened by expectations. The whole began to swim into view, and I knew I was hearing one of the best albums of the decade.

Pitchfork, deep in its brain-fried Mano Sundaresan editorial era, agreed. “If you ain’t red-lining, you ain’t headlining,” quipped his colleague Jeremy D. Larson, who assigned the gadfly Joshua Minsoo Kim to give it the highest rating (9.3) they’d given anything since Fiona Apple’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters (10). That title had previously gone to Canadian drag psychonaut Cindy Lee’s girl-group fantasia Diamond Jubilee (9.1), another proudly anti-streaming artifact that was initially available only as a sketchy download link and a YouTube playlist. But while Diamond Jubilee is already destined for classic status and is respected by young hipsters across the board for flipping the bird to the Daniel Ek apparatus, I haven’t seen anyone talk about Los Thuthanaka outside of my immediate circle of critic-types who hardly need convincing on the merits of a record like this.

Maybe it’s too weird, or maybe it’s not the right kind of weird. Too many DJ tags? Too Latin and too Indigenous? Not relatable enough? Too hopeful for glum Fantanolytes who happily sat through Sprain’s The Lamb As Effigy to justify spending an hour-plus in noise hell? Is the act of paying 11 bucks to listen to it too big of a leap for those who shirked the “suggested donation” for the Cindy Lee download? Does it just need time? Maybe people are distrustful of the new Pitchfork, which in contrast to the worst post-GQ fears is friendlier to experimental music than it’s been any time since the early 2000s. I say this not (just) to criticize latter-day music listeners but as a form of innocent speculation.

One consolation is that the siblings are likely making bank from this thing. Each Bandcamp purchase is worth something like 3,000 Spotify streams. When was the last time an album got this much acclaim that you actually had to pay for to enjoy the convenience of taking around in your back pocket? Between this and their wedding, it’s fair to speculate 2025 is an annus mirabilis for Chuquimamani-Condori. I said before that their music demands you feel what they feel. I imagine they must be happy right now. So am I whenever I let myself surrender to their music.