Rio Kosta are on the rise

“This is the odd couple right here, man, Mike is late and I'm early,” Galanopoulos laughs. “Not musically!” His partner in crime, Del Rio adds chuckling. “I have two cats and he has two dogs,” Galanopoulos adds, “we are like Oscar and Felix.” “I’m definitely the sloppy one, and Kosta is tight as a button, but I like to think we have complimentary skill sets,” says Del Rio.

The harmonious existence of theirs is the ideal for collaborators. As they put it, it’s a simple idea: “To be a Venn diagram, where there's a little overlap,” explains Del Rio, “but there's enough objectivity that you could summon the best of each other in that way. Obviously that comes with trust, and that comes with an egoless relationship.”

Meeting at a festival in 2018, as Del Rio recalls it: “I think he had a mo’ or something. We were playing keyboards and drums at the same time, and he looked like George Harrison, and it was like, ‘Who is this cat?’” Sensing a spiritual connection of sorts, they were swiftly enamoured with each other.

Having individually made their marks as session musicians as well as producers, to start, they both love to play live, as much as they consider themselves, “studio rats”. Explaining their back story, beaming in from Del Rio’s Highland Park home in Los Angeles, the pair coming together is fortuitous. Being in a band has been a longterm goal for them. For Del Rio, it was an idea he’s had since seeing The Beatles: “Those guys rolled out like a gang, or the Stones – it’s the band fantasy thing.”

Del Rio’s start is as fluid as his manner. Growing up in Queens, New York, with a musical and artistic family, what he refers to as his “lightning bolt moment” was a dancer cousin. Following in her footsteps, he began dancing. Lured in by the audience and the communal aspect, in turn he was then exposed to a litany of genres from hip-hop, to Frank Sinatra, deep disco cuts, and Broadway tunes (“you’re ingrained in the American Songbook”). He did this up until the age of 11. But it was when his parents got him a piano that he began writing music, and from that point it was all locked in and his musical fate was sealed.“Music is the only form of accepted magic in the world,” he says. “I could always feel it in my body, even now doing production and writing, you listen to your body first before you listen to your mind…if it doesn't feel right in your body, it's not going to resonate with the rest of you.”

Eventually going to school to study advertising in New York, he then worked at an ad agency as the in-house musician. Making his mark here, he then moved to LA to become an art director. Moving there 14 years ago, it would be the next 10 that he would dedicate to producing. In this time he met his wife, and together they created a duo called Powers. It was through Powers that Galanopoulos would come into his life.

Galanopoulos’ story is more streamlined. He was always attracted to groove. Growing up in a musical household, with parents listening to the likes of Bob Marley, George Jones, and Dire Straits, rhythm soon found its way into his young heart.. “You catch a little bug in your ass, kind of like something is moving you,” he explains to me. “And then when I was 10, my mom got me some drum lessons…and that was that. Now I'm here, fast forward in time, it never ended. It's not going to end. I've been playing gigs since I was 12. That's the only thing I've ever done.”

Playing in jazz bands since he was barely in double-digits, flowing freeform ideas are like oxygen to Galanopoulos. “I don't know if I ever had a lightning bolt thing,” he says, nodding to Del Rio’s idea. “Other than maybe getting in trouble when I was in kindergarten from the teacher for, like,” he mimics drumming on a surface, “on the desk.” A prolific name, he’s gone on to be a production head with a seriously rhythmic mind: “You've played on easily 1000 records, right?” Del Rio beams at his bandmate.

It’s here the pair’s bonding takes hold. Rhythm radiates throughout their offerings, and it’s the core idea of whenever they start to write: “We both react to two things, is the song good? And is the rhythm section on fire?” Galanopoulos coolly puts it.

Finding Rio Kosta’s start during the pandemic years, Del Rio recalls it was here they had the time and space to sound out their partnership. “We would just be getting baked and stoned in the middle of the night on a weekday and hang out and talk about life and talk about where we came from and what we care about.” With these chats also came the ideas that they felt were missing from the musical landscape. The result sits as the kaleidoscopic collision between Tame Impala and Khruangbin, sweetly succulent with its spacious sounds delivering harmony and melody in buckets.

During this time Del Rio was building up his home studio, and buying equipment faster than they could create. “This whole project is a happy, beautiful accident,” he says. “As a project, it was like, I have no idea where this is going or what we're doing, and it was happening so rapidly.”

Their debut album, Unicorn, bottles all of these feelings nicely. It’s a snapshot of that period where they were understanding and piecing together what it is about their connection that just makes sense. “[Unicorn] feels like the best introduction for this vehicle of this project,” Del Rio says. “I think bands should feel like a limitless art project.”

Not ones to let the whole prospect get away from them, they’re beholden to a creative bible, as they call it, they’ve created. Acting as a guidance to the project's principals and themes, like a true ad-head, its roots echo the likes of Nike or Apple with their proclamation of values – it’s about solving a problem, rather than throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks. “It was happening very naturally. As different as we are, personally, I think we love a lot of the same things and have a lot of shared values,” Del Rio says.

While the ambitions and direction of Rio Kosta are suitably fluid, that doesn’t stop this architecture of theirs giving them the values required to see they’re on the right track. Del Rio sees their position as artists as key in retaining that child like magic he mentioned at the beginning of our chat. “It's your job and your discipline to protect your inner child, because your inner child makes all the ideas happen,” he says. While for Galanopoulos, in a similar vein, it comes down to letting the music speak for itself: “Make the art that you love first, and it's going to have its own ambitions. Every piece of music is going to go and live and breathe in its own way.”

As for the bond they’ve forged between them, Del Rio nails it down to communal, celebratory music. “Regardless of genre or the artist, it’s always high frequency, positive music where people can experience it,” he says. “It was never intended to be a studio project where it's just going to live on record. There's always the vision and the idea of we want to share this with as many people as possible, and let that be the experience,” Del Rio ends.