Valebol is summer. Their music is the stickiness of the air, the glow of the sunshine and the joy of those three perfect months in the year. And that’s just what the band wanted. The duo — composed of Daniel Villarreal and Vivian McConnell — set out to make music that makes people feel good. Really good. But it took a while for their self-titled first album, which dropped earlier this month, to finally debut.
Villarreal and McConnell have known each other for many years. The two musicians (Villarreal is a solo artist and plays in Dos Santos while McConnell performs as V.V. Lightbody) lived a block apart from each other in Bridgeport. Villarreal often threw get-togethers for musicians to listen to and play music. There, the two bonded over a shared love of Brazilian music, which then turned into jam sessions in Villarreal’s basement.
“We were just improvising and it felt so good that we wanted to keep going,” McConnell recalled about those jam sessions, which began in 2016.
They began writing in Villarreal’s basement while working on their own bands and solo projects. Valebol became a new outlet for experimentation and musical expression. Soon, they began incorporating different sounds and instruments not used in their other projects, like congas, flutes and keyboards.
“It was super special and we decided to keep nurturing that,” Villarreal said.
“We joke that we’re a ‘yes’ band and we don’t say no to anything,” McConnell added. “It’s really refreshing to be in a musical world where there’s kind of no rules and no boundaries. I think we’ve grown a lot as musicians in this project.”
McConnell described V.V. Lightbody as a more “personal and emotional outlet.” Valebol provided an opportunity to write songs that were less heavy — a creative writing exercise covering topics as far-ranging as dolphins and line trees. “I could choose subjects that I could make emotional and feel attached to, but they weren’t so heavy,” McConnell said.
Later, when they were asked to play the album release party for celebrated local band Divino Niño, the group pushed themselves to make their jam session songs performance-ready.
“It’s kind of been slow on purpose. We never wanted things to feel rushed with our band,” McConnell said.
After playing their first show, they were set to begin recording more music, but the pandemic put a pause on those plans (a familiar sentiment for many musicians around the city). However, with an abundance of free time, Valebol applied for the Esteemed Artist grant from the city of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, which they won. After receiving the $10,000 grant in April 2021, they applied the funds toward the cost of recording.
Yet despite the original, sporadic origins of their music, Valebol is very much an intentional group.
“We had a vision,” Villarreal said. “We had a vision of us together, collaborating, doing this type of music, and that was examined through how we were going to present ourselves, how we would set things up on stage.”
With just two musicians in this project, embodying the rich, fleshed-out beauty of their jam-session sounds to recordings and in a live setting was an important task for McConnell and Villarreal. They did this by creating a “canvas of sounds,” utilizing multiple keyboards and other instruments from moment to moment with little breaks to make the music come alive.
“It’s not a comfortable thing that came naturally. We worked on it,” Villarreal explained. “We are always pushing ourselves. We play and we do a lot of things that are very structured in the music business. With other bands, you don’t have that freedom.”
For Valebol, part of that freedom in music comes from the strength of their friendship. Without having the constrictions of other people, the two were allowed to stretch their interests and their musicianship.
“We had the initiative, the will and the excitement to push this in a way to get us in a place that we wanted to be,” added Villarreal.
And perhaps most importantly, the two are able to have an abundance of fun together. They’re working hard, but also incorporate play into their work. These years of joy are quickly evident on their record. “Valebol,” the album, is a bright, shimmery debut. It is a collection of songs that make the listener feel nostalgic and winsome. There is a breeziness to the music, especially in songs like opener “Multivitaminas” and single “Netuchepa!” That exclamation point at the end of the name is well-earned on the track (and throughout the record). They call it “breeze pop,” and the classification is deserved. For the group, those feelings they invoke in the listener were intentional, too.
“I want people to feel physically affected by the music,” McConnell said. “I think we were always just like, ‘Let’s make music that people will dance to.’ For me, I want people to feel release or some sort of brightness, enjoy and also feel inspired to sway and move your body.”
Britt Julious is a freelance critic.
Record release show 8 p.m. June 7 at Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St.; tickets $15-$20 (ages 17+) at thaliahallchicago.com
