Eternal Rhythm: Rick Cuevas' Symbolism
In the world Michael Azerrad chronicled so vividly in Our Band Could Be Your Life, the 1980s American underground was full of artists operating far from the spotlight, self-releasing records into the void with no expectation that anyone would ever really hear them. These were the true believers — people making music not for charts or labels, but for expression, catharsis, or just the strange inner compulsion to document their lives in song. Rick Cuevas, an unassuming figure from San Jose, California, was one of them.
Released in 1984 in a private pressing of just 200 copies, Cuevas’s Symbolism might have seemed like just another basement pop record destined for the bargain bins. But it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. There was something else going on — something hushed, haunted, and oddly prescient.
Cuevas had roots in the post-punk duo Zru Vogue, whose 1981 debut was a strange hybrid of minimal wave, musique concrète, and dadaist funk. But where Zru Vogue played with absurdity and abstraction, Symbolism was a more personal and quietly intense affair. Recorded alone at home, it captured Cuevas in a transitional state — musically, emotionally, maybe even spiritually.
The songs on Symbolism are delicate but never fragile. “The Birds,” now the album’s most famous track thanks to a surprise viral revival nearly 40 years later, floats on a mournful synth line, as Cuevas sings in a restrained, almost conversational voice. “Birds don’t cry / They just disappear,” he intones — a line that feels like a miniature thesis for the whole album. These aren’t songs about emotional outbursts. They’re about slow evaporations, tiny losses, silences stretching into meaning.
Like many lo-fi auteurs of the era — think Scott Miller, Robert Scott, or early Chris Knox — Cuevas used his limitations as a strength. The hiss of the tape, the dryness of the drum machine, the restraint in his voice: it all adds to the feeling that Symbolism is less a performance than a transmission, recorded under the radar, in stolen time. Even the brighter songs, like “Long Way to Go,” are shaded by a kind of suburban malaise — an ambient melancholy that seems baked into the synths themselves.
What makes Symbolism so compelling in hindsight is how it anticipated a certain aesthetic long before it had a name. The bedroom pop of the 2010s, the vaporwave hauntology of the 2020s, even the synth-forward singer-songwriter hybrids of artists like John Maus or Molly Nilsson — you can hear their DNA in Cuevas’s work. He wasn’t trying to be ahead of the curve. He just was.
That’s why the album’s resurrection, first through online bootlegs and later with a beautifully remastered 2025 reissue by Numero Group, feels so satisfying — and so bittersweet. Here was a record that was never really “released” in the conventional sense finally receiving its due, decades after it was quietly born and shelved. Cuevas, who passed away before the reissue, never got to see the new audience discovering his work. But the reemergence of Symbolism suggests something important: that even the most obscure art can echo through time, if it's made with honesty.
In the mythology of the American indie underground, there’s a kind of holiness in obscurity. The idea that the purest music is made far from the machinery of the industry. Symbolism is that idea made flesh — not just a lost record, but a found one. A document of one man’s search for beauty, recorded alone, nearly forgotten, and now reborn. Not with fanfare, but with reverence.
In a sense, Symbolism lives up to its name. It is a symbol — of music’s strange ability to outlast its moment, to wait patiently in the dark for the world to catch up.
Order Numero Group's reissue here
