It’s 3:00 p.m. on the third day of the 2019 Estéreo Picnic Festival when Nicolás y Los Fumadores arrive to open the Tigo Stage, the event’s largest one. For one of Bogotá’s hottest indie bands at the time, their performance signals that the mainstream industry is finally paying attention to Colombia’s underground scene. Yet the band members themselves seem unaware of the significance of the moment. What they feel instead is vertigo and anxiety. After all, it is likely their biggest performance to date, following opening a show for Zoé in October 2018.
“That was the last time I stepped onto a stage tipsy. I don’t remember much of it. It was just a rush of adrenaline,” recalls Santiago García, the band’s vocalist and guitarist. For a seemingly nonchalant band that often jokes about itself, it was a trial not to break character in front of hundreds of people.
Though the band returned to the event three years ago, their upcoming performance at Estéreo Picnic (March 20) marks how they continue to spearhead Colombia’s indie scene. A decade into their career, they stand largely alone, as most of their early contemporaries have disappeared. Las Yumbeñas, Quemarlo todo por error, Montaña, La Hermanastra Más Fea, and Aguas Ardientes faded from the music landscape just a few years later.
But Juan Carlos “Charlie” Sánchez, the band’s drummer, downplays their ascension. “I have the feeling the show shouldn’t be very different [from what we did the first time],” he says. “The video we are projecting is basically just us looking really tired. That actually excites me,” he shares, remembering their first performance at Estéreo Picnic, when they accompanied their show with a visual loop doing the same: nothing.
Boredom and weariness, after all, are precisely what drive this Bogotá-based quartet. With the release of their debut album, 2018’s Como pez en el hielo, the band established a clear poetic direction: caustic humor set against guitars indebted to Mac DeMarco, used to portray—ironically—that traumatic rite of passage between adolescence and adulthood, when leaving high school means entering the university world without having quite stopped being a child.
The album repeatedly circles a sense of fatigue disguised as melancholy. In “Triste Otra Vez,” García sings with disarming resignation: “I’m sad again / but I’m always sad.” Meanwhile, “Bailando Triste” recounts the story of a dull party the protagonist ultimately abandons out of sheer boredom: “This can only go wrong / and now I’m here dancing sadly / I paid 20 lucas [five bucks] and I’m dancing alone.” He couldn’t even manage to get a small juice box.
Back then, what mattered most to the band was crafting humorous stories over instrumental sketches, often with titles before any lyrics existed. “The lyrics to ‘Bruce y Margaret,’ for example, are a joke. Completely a joke. They were never meant to be taken seriously,” García says with some bewilderment. “It’s strange that people take them that way.” It’s not unlike when couples in the U.S. decide to toast their wedding with R.E.M.’s “The One I Love,” where the lyrics adopt the perspective of a manipulative individual who treats others as replaceable placeholders, devoid of genuine affection.
But with maturity comes the realization that even laughter has its limits. Self-deprecating humor becomes less a solution than a defense mechanism against the hostility of urban life—especially in a South American metropolis. Eventually, the joke gives way to a more sobering reality: precarious work, long hours in a North American call center—as they recall in “El Túnel” when they sing, “I don’t want to rot in a call center, but neither I want to go to eat shit to another country”—, and the quiet collapse of youthful dreams of a glittering future.
That is why Dios y la mata de lulo from 2022 resonates with greater anxiety and desperation. The humor fades. What once might have been an absurd anecdote—a city dweller sunburned on a road trip with friends—now feels delirious and vaguely threatening. Nochenegra (2025) goes even further: it’s a moodier record with somber poetry accompanying icy instrumentals.
For nearly a decade, Nicolás y Los Fumadores have chronicled the grittier side of growing up: that narrow window between your 20s and 30s when the night ends and the bill finally arrives. It’s the moment when freedom reveals itself as a double-edged sword, representing independence on one side and the quiet dissolution of youthful illusions on the other.
Meanwhile, the band lights another cigarette and prepares to return to Estéreo Picnic, reaffirming its unlikely but undeniable place in Bogotá’s indie ecosystem.
Maybe now they can finally pay their overdue bills.
Maybe.