After listening to their newest album, Harvest, one might not think that the good musical vibes of BALTHVS could be produced by a bassist who only learned to play the instrument over the past few years, a drummer who purchased his first kit in 2020 and a guitarist who gave up a law career to form a psychedelic rock outfit.

If so, one might be better off just listening to the music and not worrying about much else.

“We are so grateful to be visiting the U.S.,” guitarist Balthazar Aguirre said from Bogotà, Colombia, where the band is based. “This one is a major leap for us because we’ve toured sections of the U.S. before, but this time, we are actually going coast to coast. It’s the biggest tour of our careers.”

Since the trio, which includes drummer Santiago Lizcano and bassist-singer Johanna Mercuriana, formed in 2020, it has been on a steady rise, making its “gateway” performance in 2022 at Austin’s SXSW festival. Now they’re playing Outside Lands.

Fusing elements of funk, Middle Eastern, cumbia, surf rock and disco, BALTHVS (pronounced in English as bôl-thus and in Spanish as Bal-tus) prides itself on a genre-bending sound. If there’s one overarching element that best characterizes the band’s style, however, it’s one with clear roots to acts like Santana and The Grateful Dead. At its core, BALTHVS is a contemporary band leaning heavily, and perhaps completely, on psychedelia.

Mind-altering substances have very little to do with the band’s philosophy.

“I was not introduced to psychedelics by my teenage friends wanting to get high,” Aguirre clarified. “That was never my approach. I was reading Timothy Leary’s ‘Tibetan Book of the Dead’ and Richard Alpert’s studies of psychotherapy and psychology with psychedelics.”

Aguirre is emphatic that while he did use substances earlier on, he did so in a more ritualistic way.

“I love rock music, but nothing has ever persuaded or convinced me that taking a lot of drugs and doing a lot of harm to my body is a reasonable idea. That doesn’t make sense to me,” he said. “I got the information that I needed from those first experiences.”

While talking, Aguirre frequently stops himself, seemingly searching for a better way to express what he’s feeling. Like Coleridge trying to graph out love for the early Romantics or Plato attempting to define the human soul for the Stoics, Aguirre’s approach seems more aligned with finding ways to practically apply the philosophy. As a band, BALTHVS seems to have adopted this as an ethos.

Maintaining an aggressive rehearsal schedule is also a much-needed part of that ethos.

Aguirre found his way to the electric guitar when he was 18 years old. Prior to that, he had some experience playing violin.

“When I got into guitar, it was like falling in love. I just became obsessed,” he said. “But I also had to go to university. So I went to law school. All the time, I was skipping a lot of classes and playing guitar. I did graduate, so I am a lawyer in Colombia. But I only worked there for six months before I was fed up with that. I just wanted to pursue music.”

When asked how the family responded, Aguirre laughed.

“Complete alienation.”

They came around to his decision more recently, he added. Aguirre’s story highlights a kind of utilitarian approach that each band member seems to share. Lizcano’s musical journey also includes a needed change in musical instrumentation, starting with guitar when a young childhood friend of about 6 impressed him with a rendition of Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir.”

Lizcano describes early lessons from his father, who also played guitar, as well as elementary level music classes. It was during those classes where he discovered drums.

“I was 13, and they told me that I couldn’t play guitar, but I could play another instrument. So I was like, ‘Probably drums?’” he said, laughing. “That was a pain in the ass for me in the beginning. It was fucking hard [for me] to understand, to tell my body to do the things it had to do.”

Lizcano stuck with drums and began playing in school bands because there was a surplus of guitar players and lack of drummers; a tale as old as time.

“Then one day during a rehearsal – we had taken acid – I was so touched by the music we were making, that I was comfortable where I was. That was the moment I knew I wanted to play drums for the rest of my life.”

Lizcano met Aguirre and the two started a band.

“It was an effort of ours trying to be like Santana or The Grateful Dead,” Aguirre said. “A very psychedelic Latin, very upbeat and crazy kind of music. It wasn’t working out.”

Then, a year later, after making the many rounds in the lively Bogotá music scene, Aguirre and Lizcano caught a performance of the person who would change the direction of their collective music careers.

“She was a singer-songwriter, making folk songs, mostly Andean and Peruvian music,” Aguirre said.

Mercuriana had a distinctive voice and played charango, a six-string instrument that Aguirre compared with a ukulele. Within a month, the three were spending nearly all of their time together. Both Aguirre and Lizcano felt her impact as both a musician and kindred spirit. Together, they thought that they could make a great band. The only problem was that the band they envisioned needed a bassist; an instrument on which Mercuriana had virtually no experience.

“The first time that I played bass, I was about 20 years old. And it was a disaster,” Mercuriana said, laughing. “The truth is, I didn’t feel I’d connected. Then during the pandemic, I started to play bass again with Balthazar. He taught me to play everything he knew on the guitar. I began to see the bass in a different way.”

Aguirre said that he was amazed with Mercuriana’s progress, almost to the extent that he could not believe she hadn’t played the instrument before. That’s when they decided to give it a go at becoming professional musicians.

The first year of BALTHVS was supported by a do-it-yourself attitude. The band lived together and recorded its first album, 2020’s Macrocosm, in Aguirre’s family country house outside of Bogotá. Aguirre produced, engineered and composed most of the tracks. Lizcano acquired a drum kit. Mercuriana was fast-tracking to become both bassist and lead singer.

Despite the lack of resources, the trio maintained a vigorous work schedule, producing and releasing nearly one song a month. For its second and third albums, 2022’s Cause and Effect and 2023’s Third Vibration, production moved to Aguirre’s apartment studio in Bogotá. The audiences got bigger. A 2022 performance at Rock al Parque, one of Colombia’s largest music festivals, was an indication that the hard work was starting to pay off. Another was the dramatic uptick in music streams: over 15 million worldwide.

With three albums and 39 singles, the trio made a month-long excursion to La Mesa, a tropical hillside town two hours west of Bogotá, to record this year’s Harvest.

“This album is a mixture between our souls,” Lizcano said. “We were surrounded by nature. Fruits. Animals. A lot of birds. When I listen to this album, I’m just going back to that month. It’s like seeing a photograph from the past. … I really feel the things that I was feeling those days.”

Lizcano added that it was also an experience closely linked to national geography.

“We have a lot of cultural influences around music and the way of living, which I believe is pretty different from living in other parts of the world,” he said. “As a Colombian, people are pretty much oriented to not working. It’s not that people do not work here. We work our asses off. But I think that they don’t mix their personalities with their existential way of being, with the [professional] work area of their lives. I couldn’t give you an example of this, because it’s something you feel when you are around people.”

By the time the band had eight or 10 songs, Aguirre, Lizcano and Mercuriana started making their final decisions for the album’s arrangement. Aguirre stressed that they used their intuition to determine which song flows well with the other.

“Our albums are compilations of short stories,” he said.

Creatively, Harvest marks another first for BALTHVS. With Mercuriana achieving a new level of comfort on the bass, composition of songs was now divided three ways.

“It had taken me a while to get into as many rhythms and genres as possible,” she said. “I can say now that I feel very happy and proud of this for my first four years playing bass.”

Added Lizcano: “For me, having my first drum kit bought because of the money I earned with music means a lot. I used to play on my legs, just hitting my feet on the floor.”

In many ways, playing Outside Lands is something of a spiritual homecoming for BALTHVS.

“The Bay Area has been pivotal in shaping the world,” Aguirre said. “Counterculture was born there. The Grateful Dead were from there. Quicksilver Messenger Service. Santana. All of these revolutionary thoughts. All of that is just as important in my life as whatever happened in Colombia.”

Aguirre then recalled an experience that the band had following a performance in Berkeley last March.

“We were going to our AirBnB, which was across the Bay. It was midnight or 1 a.m., and I suddenly told our tour manager, ‘Stop. We’ve got to go to Haight and Ashbury. Please. I beg you,’” he said. “So we went there, and as soon as we go outside, we see the mythical [Grateful Dead] house. I just started putting ‘Ripple’ on my phone. For me, it was a pilgrimage.”

While paying their tributes in the Haight, neighbors saw the band and invited them to chat.

“They were like, ‘Oh, kindred spirits. Come in,’” he continued. “We hung out until 3 a.m. talking about music and things. It was magical to be there. … We just came to the city at midnight unannounced, and we got embraced by its people. In the two days that we spent in the Bay Area, we’ve been received like family. I’m so happy to be back.”

Follow Jesse Herwitz at Twitter.com/JesseHerwitz and Instagram.com/JesseHerwitz.