By now, it feels natural to assume that the water in Barcelos must have something special. What exactly, we may never know, but what it has done for rock in this country is nothing short of remarkable. Solar Corona were born from that creative bubbling of a city that shows how rock can be written with crooked lines — as it should be. Formed in 2013, they reached a settled line-up in 2016, crystallizing as a quartet: Rodrigo Carvalho (guitar/synths), Peter Carvalho (drums), José Roberto Gomes (bass), and Julius Gabriel (saxophone/synths). After releasing three EPs between 2013 and 2016, Solar Corona arrived at Lightning One, their first full-length album, the result of years of labor in pursuit of a sound that could triumph in this formation.

The sweat of that conquest is felt immediately. Love Is Calling opens hostilities for an album that communes with the rebirth of certain rock currents while absorbing knowledge from cosmic paths parallel to the progressive rock of the 1970s and 1980s. With a dose of romanticism, Love Is Calling morphs from a false doom-metal ballad into a hard rock track painted in heavy makeup, setting the tone for Lightning One.

In a single song, Solar Corona slip in and out of stoner rock garb and pave a highway to hellish, fast-paced rock — hypnotic desires with every reason to be as pop and craved as possible. Take Rebound, for instance: it storms into the ears and flows like honey, an odyssey that compresses into six minutes stories that rock in other decades would take far longer to tell. A progressive gallop, a crescendo of sonic hypnosis that suddenly drops back down to earth only to justify a new ascent. Rebound falls in order to renew itself — softly at first, then with the vigor of a saxophone that delivers a tremendous rebirth of the track, a new light, a new life. It reveals the sax as one of the most dazzling traits of Lightning One: the element that both shakes and cradles Solar Corona’s rock.

Children of the 21st century, Solar Corona have learned how to grab attention from the very first second and sustain that feeling of constant alert throughout the entire ride: a Steve Jobs keynote in a state of perpetual electric jubilation and cosmic lust. Lightning One is a top-level journey, with the right coordinates in the mix by José Arantes, mastering by Chris Hardman, and artwork by Serafim Mendes — who translates into image the vast psychedelic-tropic highways that converge in Solar Corona.