EDITOR’S NOTE: This weekend, organizers say, brings the 25th and final Underground Music Showcase “in its current form.” To mark the occasion, Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore – who started The UMS in 2001 – is bringing back the poll that started it all.

In 2001, Moore surveyed local music experts about the underground bands and artists they felt were most worthy of more mainstream recognition. The results became the basis for an annual live showcase of local bands that grew into The UMS, which this weekend will feature 200 bands across 12 indoor venues and four outdoor stages along a 1-mile stretch of Broadway in the Baker neighborhood.

Moore stopped conducting the annual poll in 2010. But with the festival now coming to a probable end, here’s one final introduction to 10 local bands and artists our panel of industry insiders recommend you check out. In all, nearly 100 bands received votes. All this week we are counting down the top 10, two per day.

3. LOS MOCOCHETES

The name Los Mocochetes, self-described by the band, is Spanish slang for “snot-nosed brats with machetes.”

The thinking goes something like this: Once you grow physically strong enough to wield a tool or a weapon, you have acquired a power that comes with the potential for both creation and destruction. How you choose to use your machete will define the mark you leave on the world.

“This duality exists in all of us,” the band says in its official bio.

“Los Mocochetes have devoted their lives to using their machetes for good. Each song is a prayer meant to move your feet, stir your spirit, and to remind you of the incredible power you have to heal yourself.”

Los Mocochetes is all about starting a revolution … that you can dance to.

The band, deeply rooted in Mexican funk, cumbia, reggae, hip-hop and rock, is made up of expert musicians, committed activists and passionate educators. For a decade, they have used  their musical platform to call attention to racism, gentrification, immigration and other injustices and inequities through songs both transparently political and deeply personal.

The official video for “Christmas as Cold as ICE” is essentially a short film about a Denver girl who cries herself to sleep each night for her deported father. “There’s no freedom without freedom for them all,” Jozer Guerrero sings.   

“Que Viva Revolucion!” is a mini-musical documentary that honors the 150 students who walked out of Denver’s West High School in 1969 after a teacher made racist remarks toward students of Mexican descent. It was the beginning of one of the largest student protests in Colorado history, and it was met with police violence. 

The band’s video intermixes archival news coverage with footage taken at a gathering held at the school 50 years later to celebrate all those young people who took a stand back in 1969.

The band takes every opportunity to demand freedom for Denver’s Jeanette Vizguerra – a nationally known immigration-rights activist who has been held in ICE custody in Aurora since March 17, when she was arrested outside her job at Target. Her lawyer says it was retaliation for her public criticism of federal immigration policy.

Now in its 10th year, Los Mocochetes just finished third in a Denver Gazette poll of local music experts on underground bands most deserving of more mainstream attention. But the band’s public profile has been rapidly expanding the past few years. In 2024, it was one of only two Colorado bands invited to play in the inaugural Outside Festival in Civic Center Park. 

The band was inside Denver East High School on March 22, 2023, the day two deans were shot and wounded by a student during a search for weapons. The band had been invited to perform at a school assembly to acknowledge the recent gun death of another Denver East student. Guerrero, a graduate of Denver West, was reciting his own poem, “Walking Towards Freedom,” for about 400 students gathered in the school’s theater when he heard rustling backstage. The theme of his piece, Guerrero said at the time, “was standing up as one community against gun violence.”

The pandemonium that erupted was brought to an abrupt end when a teacher issued an immediate, emphatic command: “Silence!“ The school was on lockdown.

“The scariest part was witnessing 400-plus kids go from making all that noise to not saying one word,” Guerrero said. “It was complete silence.”

Guerrero, himself a father and educator, had two words of advice for all those traumatized students at East High School, especially those budding artists whose voices were silenced by gunfire that day:

“Keep going.”

• Website: losmocochetes.wixsite.com/mocoso

• Year started: 2016

• Members: Joshua Randy Abeyta (vox, guitar, bass, trumpet, djembe), Diego Florez-Arroyo (Vox, Bass, Guitar), Elias Garcia (Vox, Guitar), Jozer Guerrero (Vox, Bongos, Guira/Aux Percussion), Jon Rubio (Vox, Drums) 

• What makes you local: Four of the five were born in Denver, all raised here via New and “Old” Mexico with indigenous bloodlines that have been here for centuries. Millenia. 

• Seminal single: “Huaraches” or “Sun Will Shine”

• Describe your music: Xicano/Funk

• Watch it! “Que Viva Revolucion!“

• One favorite Colorado band: Anthony Ruptak

• When did you know your band was for real? “Do we?”

• Catch us live: We will be playing Aug. 2 at the Dacono Music Festival and Aug. 6 at Bands on the Bricks in Boulder

• Next music drop: Full-length album coming out later this year

• What’s on your mind? “Free Jeanette Vizguerra!” 

• Our live shows are like “… cruisin down Feds in your low low on Cinco de Mayo.”