The US-Mexico border has always been a subject for surf rock, a musical genre with roots that extend back to 60s southern California. Surf rock usually has no lyrics, and the songs traditionally associated Mexico with the Wild West, musically harkening back to distinctive Spanish styles and composers. Some surf rock songs represented a border between the US and Mexico that relied on stereotypes seeking to represent otherness as exotic and ideologically neutered (as in Herb Alpert’s songs). But today, many of the Mexican bands that play neo-surf, a microgenre of music born in the 90s, have begun to complicate these representations.

The Twin Tones are one such band, and their exploration of what has been called the Chili Western sound in neo-surf music is an act of appropriation and reversal of stereotypes fueled by Spaghetti Western films and musicians like Herb Alpert. Alpert is best known for making the trumpet-driven Tijuana Sound internationally famous, even though the music actually being played in Tijuana during the 60s was closer to African-American blues and rock ’n’ roll. “When Elvis hit Tijuana,” Kun writes, “they knew ‘the king of rock and roll’ crown was ironic. They recognized the black shadow in his sound.” Kun implies that the subversive potential of the real Tijuana sound in the 60s was overshadowed by the stereotypical, ideologically neutered version of Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass. Kun considers Alpert’s “Tijuana Sound” to be a “a closer-to-home version of the exotica boom’s tiki fantasies in the 1950s; Mexico, not Polynesia, Ole! Not Taboo!” Alpert’s music also served as a way to alleviate anxiety about growing 60s social unrest.

What the Twin Tones offer is an imaginary border, a sonic substitute that stands in opposition to Alpert’s Tijuana. In their debut album, Nación Apache, surf’s Ol’ Mexico representations of the border are clearly challenged. “Territorio robado (El Dorado)” (literally “Stolen Territory,”) features audio samples where cowboys talk about arriving at a town with a Spanish name, fulfilling the stereotype of bandits trying to escape the law by fleeing south. The big difference here is that instead of showing the conquistadors gloriously arriving from south to north at the golden pavilions of El Dorado, it portrays a gang of bandits fleeing south of the border. Moreover, since the US southern states were once part of Mexico, the title “stolen territory” raises the polemic issue about whether the Mexican-American War was fair in the first place (tellingly, in Mexico this war is called “The American Invasion”). Under this light, territorial invasion and occupation is likened to a bandit getaway.

The second, a slower song that contrasts with its subtitle (“Promised Land”), is a nod to the...