ALTURAS are a San José, Costa Rica band making shoegaze that keeps moving with a style. The guitars spread wide through delay, reverse reverb, chorus and vibrato. Bass lines carry their own melodies, the drums keep a clear pulse, and Rudy Gutiérrez’s vocals sit further back in the mix.
There is dream-pop softness, post-punk momentum and a sensual alt-rock pull in there too, and Spanish gives the melodies another kind of flow against the washed-out guitars. If you happen to have a convertible and an empty road across Nevada, fair enough. If you are in San José or Warsaw, a long walk with headphones will do.
Rudy has a name for this particular corner of the sound: “Anygaze“. It started as a joke between him and a friend, close to saying “anyways”. She was also the person who introduced him to Fernanda Ramírez, now ALTURAS’ guitarist. The “any” gradually became useful because the band could move through jangle-pop, dream-pop, indie rock, noise pop, shoegaze and grungegaze without forcing every song into one box.
“I think of Anygaze as Costa Rican dream-pop/shoegaze:”
“Thereal but fast and upbeat, danceable but dreamy, noisy but melodic. The vocals can be delicate and sit further back in the mix, but still carry energy and emotional force. Within ALTURAS, the songs that best define that sound for me are ‘No Quieres Ver,’ ‘Saturno y Poás’ and ‘Llueve en San José.'”
The wider reference points include DIIV, Beach Fossils, Wisp, our beloved Fin del Mundo, Bestia Bebé and Margaritas Podridas. The local version took shape through the people Rudy met around San José. He came into that circle while playing in Full Disposition. At one show they shared a bill with Caucel, whose drummer Pablo Matamoros now plays in Lentamente. Around the same time Rudy went looking for a reverb pedal on Facebook and met Lentamente singer-songwriter Ario Rojas.
That pedal purchase ended up changing a lot. Rudy says Ario introduced him to the sound he had been looking for his whole life. Lentamente are still probably his favourite band from the scene, and he calls Ario “a musical genius”, singling out the way he moves between genres and builds space in the arrangements. Ario started inviting him to shows, where he got to know Adiós Cometa, Dylan Thomas and A Su Ladera, then the wider group of bands and people around Sello Furia. Centro Sónico belongs to the same small circle of connections.
Rudy also became friends with nomeolvides through mutual friends from Full Disposition. The two bands organised their first show together in a basement in downtown San José. It was the debut concert for both ALTURAS and nomeolvides, and the room filled to the back with people spilling onto the stairs. Rudy filmed a documentary around that night, including footage from both bands’ first sets.
“I remember realizing that something we had organized ourselves, with friends, had brought all those people into the same room. It was one of the first moments when ALTURAS started to feel like something real outside of my own recordings.”
Sello Furia connects a lot of this local activity.
Its orbit also reaches into emo and scramz through bands including Nuncamuere and Cabeza de Agua, with the same people and DIY spaces crossing between scenes.
On June 28, 2025, ALTURAS played Sello Furia’s anniversary show at Amón Solar with Adiós Cometa and A Su Ladera. That night later became the opening scene of Richard Villegas’s Bandcamp Daily report on Central American shoegaze and post-punk. By then, these were already people and bands Rudy knew through gigs around San José.y.
ALTURAS released their 11-track debut album, “Todas las Verdades y la Ficción”, through Sello Furia on September 10. The record keeps returning to what happens when lived experience becomes memory, memory changes with time, and imagined things begin to sit beside real ones. Rudy sees the album moving from dreams, fantasy and imagined possibilities into deeper and more concrete experiences of reality and the mind. On the final track, “Profundidad“, that movement loops back towards the mental world, where experience can become memory, imagination and fiction again.
Several of those songs had already been around for a while by the time the album came together. “Todo Se Olvida” was ALTURAS’ debut single in January 2024, followed by “Destellos” in April and “Profundidad” in October. “Bobinsana” arrived in April 2025. The album itself was recorded in San José across 2024-2026, so parts of “Todas las Verdades y la Ficción” had already been changing with the band for more than two years before the full record appeared.
The songs keep changing for him after they have been written, and the lyrics leave enough room for new experiences to attach themselves over time. “Todo Se Olvida” began with a secret relationship. Rudy now hears another lost relationship in the same words. “Llueve en San José” started with loneliness and uncertainty about whether being alone or with somebody would feel any better. These days he connects it much more strongly with living in the past. “No Quieres Ver” began with a friend who kept putting his problems on Rudy; over time, the song became tied to self-sabotage and the habit of covering problems without healing them.
“None of these songs necessarily began as a false memory. What changed was the meaning I attached to them. The same words and sounds remain, but the person listening to them is no longer exactly the same.”
That older version of “Llueve en San José” reaches back to one of ALTURAS’ first original songs, written for Sello Furia’s “Acústico 02“. Rudy can now hear early traces of the album’s later preoccupation with memory and place in it. La California and Barrio Escalante bring back his first concerts and earliest experiences of seeing bands live. The Steinvorth building, Amón Solar and Starview belong more closely to the current life of ALTURAS.
“When I think about memory and place, I think about how the same city can contain different versions of your life. You can move through familiar places while carrying memories of who you were, what you experienced there and what those places mean to you now. The city is real, but the way you experience it is constantly being shaped by memory. A place can remain the same while the meaning we attach to it changes.”
The studio version of “Llueve en San José” changed with the band as well. It had started as an acoustic recording, then live shows gave it a different energy, so Rudy went back into the studio wanting to keep more of that movement. “No Quieres Ver”, one of the album’s focus tracks, is one of the clearest examples of how immediate ALTURAS can be: fast, noisy and melodic, driven by a two-string guitar riff and moving through shoegaze, dream-pop and post-punk.
Rudy usually starts with a feeling and tries to turn it into a guitar riff. From there he works through melodies, harmonies and rhythmic parts between the guitars, adds a bass line that gives the song more of its rhythmic identity, then builds the drums and fills. Lyrics come once the music is fully arranged. He will listen to the instrumental several times and write from what it brings up for him. The guitar setup does a lot of work: overlapping delays, several reverbs, reverse reverb, stereo delay, chorus and vibrato, plus vintage pedals and newer units built around sounds from the 1970s and 1980s. His amp collection reaches back to tube models from the 1960s.
Rudy builds the production around width and space. Guitars and vocals make up much of the wall, bass often carries a separate melody, and the drums keep the songs moving. At the end of “Profundidad”, a large final guitar solo almost disappears into the rest of the mix. “Todo Se Olvida” drops into a quiet ambient section, thins almost to nothing, then returns suddenly. Rudy compares that moment to getting lost in a dream and waking up again.
For the opening track, “Desde el Cenit“, Rudy played records he and the others found strange and unfamiliar through the turntable at his house, put microphones on the speakers, recorded the playback and distorted those recordings. The finished piece keeps the warmth, grain, scratches and other imperfections from the vinyl. Carla Alfaro added the ambient synthesiser part, and Rudy combined those sounds with dialogue from “Paprika”.
“Paprika” also gave the album its title and part of its central idea. Rudy hid smaller references to the film through the lyrics, while “Desde el Cenit” uses part of the Spanish-dub dialogue containing the phrase “Todas las Verdades y la Ficción”. The record starts with borrowed fragments, recorded surfaces and voices that have already passed through another medium before ALTURAS reshape them.
The visual side was built from physical fragments too. The cover uses original analogue cyanotypes made and scanned in Turrialba, Costa Rica, with real topographic lines by Andrés Padilla and design by Rodrigo Bogantes. Satellite imagery, clouds, ASCII text and digital errors sit among those analogue processes. The idea behind it is simple enough: a machine trying to remember something human.
“I like that the album begins with these sounds and references that already feel like fragments of something else: recordings, dialogue, textures and pieces of another world being brought together to create a new one. That process feels connected to the way memory works for me. You take things that already exist, distort them, combine them with other experiences and eventually they become part of something new.”
Several tracks brought other writers and players into Rudy’s original private idea. Fernanda Ramírez and Neto Carranza composed “Fueron las Ventanas…” together, Neto recorded its guitars, and Rudy produced it. Pablo Matamoros and Diego Cordero alternate on drums across the record, playing parts composed by Rudy and Franco Fernández. Franco also recorded maracas and other percussion effects. Felipe “Pipe” Moya played several of the bass parts Rudy had written. Most of the album was composed by Rudy, with the specific collaborations from Carla, Neto and Fernanda opening it up in other directions.
ALTURAS play live as Rudy on vocals and guitar, Fernanda on guitar, Felipe on bass and Franco on drums. Rudy recorded the album in San José with the musicians involved across the sessions, including Pablo Matamoros and Diego Cordero on drums, Felipe on several bass parts, Carla Alfaro on synthesiser and Neto Carranza on guitars for “Fueron las Ventanas…”.
Pablo Ocampo mixed and mastered the record at Miut Audio. Rodrigo Bogantes handled the graphic design, while the current press photography is by Josimar Hall.
Those connections had crossed borders before the album. Sello Furia’s four-way split “Un Mismo Instante” brought together ALTURAS and nomeolvides from Costa Rica, Anajunno from Argentina and Películas Como Juno from Mexico, with one song from each band. ALTURAS contributed “Muerto Resplandor”, with Fernanda Ramírez handling the lyrics and vocals. The split grew directly out of the relationship between ALTURAS and nomeolvides after the two bands made their live debuts together at Centro Sónico.
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Furia has also organised shows with our recent guests Jardín Animal from Nicaragua, No Somos Marineros from Mexico and Montegrande from Argentina, and released a split between Lentamente and Chile’s Tolva. Rudy also points to Templo Animal in Honduras, Lógica Ciega in Panama and Citrus City’s links with Guatemalan music and its diaspora, alongside the Central American Music Market and MIM LatAm as regional infrastructure helping music move between countries.
Mexico’s La Bestia Music Inc. is another example Rudy singles out: rehearsal rooms, recording, a label, a shop, radio and live events all under one independent umbrella, with La Bestia Radio extending the same ecosystem. For Rudy, these spaces matter because bands need places to rehearse, record, play and circulate their work in real life as well as online.
KEXP and NPR have also put some of those names in front of larger audiences. KEXP’s 2024 “Aquí y Ahora” feature on Latin American post-rock included Guatemala’s Asimov and Argentina’s Fin del Mundo, and recommended Costa Rican bands Adiós Cometa and Dylan Thomas. In September 2025, KEXP’s “El Sonido: Cancioneros” dedicated an episode to Adiós Cometa and premiered their collaboration with Fin del Mundo, “El Mundo en mis Brazos (Leonor)”. Rudy also points to NPR’s “El Tiny” as another place where Latin American artists are getting more room.
“I would not say that this automatically means the Central American shoegaze scene has broken through internationally, but it does make the possibility feel much more tangible.”
ALTURAS celebrate the album live on September 19 at El Muro Art Pub in San José with Dylan Thomas and Unas Palabras.
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“I think the most important thing I would want someone outside the region to understand is that there is already a lot happening here. The music does not need to become international before it becomes meaningful. What we need are more bridges so that people outside Central America can hear what these scenes have already been building.”
