Telescope Thieves' 'Quiet Hearts' EP is Booty Jams for Sadboys

When out-of-towners imagine Miami, they see South Beach, megaclubs, Art Deco, champagne bottles, and plastic body parts. It's not quite the town where you'd guess the next great future beats EP would emerge, but thanks to Telescope Thieves' Mario De Los Santos, it just did.

"I felt like I was the only person in Miami not only doing that kind of music, but even listening to it for a little while. Now I feel like it's starting to pick up," De Los Santos says. "I feel like it's going in a good direction, and I'm happy that I'm at the forefront of it."

Quiet Hearts, released on Miami's new Space Tapes Records, is four tracks of soulful, sensual introspection. It dances beautifully on the line of poignant and catchy, skillfully managing to be both haunting and fanciful. Telescope Thieves merges the stirring qualities of Cashmere Cat and XXYYXX with a hidden tropical vibrancy and just enough Southern Hip Hop lean to make your head nod. It's a passion project, something he slaved on between long work days, sometimes only 30 minutes to an hour at a time.

The EP is evidence of how Miami is going through a cultural reawakening. A new generation is finding itself on the mainland, and De Los Santos, as a first generation Dominican-American, reflects that regional shift in his own musical progression.

"You immigrate here, and your parents have all this music and ideas from their country," he said. "As a kid, you try to assimilate as much as you can to where you're living. You don't really wanna connect yourself to your past that much."

Growing up, De Los Santos was influenced more by American genres, from jazz to hip hop and house music. Having produced as a hobby for the past decade, he's finally found his footing.

"All that stuff, that's what future beats is: it's the next step forward in killing a genre. You take the real standard pieces of certain genres, the real standard hip-hop beat, the really standard kind of R&B synth, but you're taking it to another level. You're using it in a new concept."

"This record particularly has been personal," he explains. "Growing up, I was really shy, really introverted, and to a certain extent I'm still kinda shy and introverted. I don't really look up that much when I'm performing. Obviously, when you're a teenager and you're young, you're even more insecure in yourself, and I always felt there were always these certain songs that would come on that, for those three or four minutes while the song was playing, you felt like, no matter what the rest of your day was like, you felt really sexy, you felt cool, like you were the shit."

That was the motivation behind the EP: to create a collection of songs that could unite De Los Santos and those like him. It gives swagger to the meek, and that, in a lot of ways, is what the new Miami is all about.

"To me, Quiet Hearts was a personality type, someone kind of like me who likes intimate settings, who's not really about the big club thing, is down to go to just a dark bar and chill with some close friends," he said. "I felt like that kind of person also tends to not be super full of themselves of really confident, and I felt they need that song that's like, you're about to go to a job interview, you're first date with someone, and you're super nervous. You need that one song that's gonna put you in that mood like 'nah, you're the shit. There's nothing wrong with you. You're cool.'"

Telescope Thieves on FB // Soundcloud

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