Cinco de Mayo is an important date for many Mexican Americans and non Mexican Americans alike. Though rooted in marking the Mexican victory at the Battle of Puebla, it has become a date where people find any excuse to drink a margarita, eat some tacos and listen to great music from the region.

For Los Angeles based band Tremoloco, it is an anniversary of sorts to when the band launched as a project playing to a large crowd in their hometown in 2006 when they didn’t have any released material or even a name for the band, a name which was formed by blending Tremolo and loco on the suggestion of Ben Harper and Stephen Bruton.

This year, Cinco De Mayo will mark a brand new era for the band with the Texas release of their upcoming album Curandera Volume 1. The album will be available globally on June 2 but for the first two weeks of the month fans in Houston, Austin, San Antonio and Galveston can hear it first and catch the band live.

They will kick off their Texas tour with a performance here in Houston on Thursday, May 4 at Shoeshine Charley’s Big Top Lounge during the monthly First Thursday block party celebration in the Mid Main block benefitting Writers In The Schools.

“We are really excited and looking forward to seeing everybody and I just can't wait for everybody to hear the record and the songs. I’m super excited,” says Houston’s Roberto Rodriguez III who played accordion on the album and will be also on bass duty for the bands live shows.

For this album Rodriguez, who has played on three of the band's previous albums, transplanted himself to California where he and founder Tony Zamora worked side by side in the studio along with producer and drummer extraordinaire Cougar Estrada to make the album.

Estrada will be joining Tremoloco for their Houston shows along with local pedal steel player Willy T. Golden and multifaceted vocalist Hannah Underwood, who also play on the album.

There has long been a symbiotic relationship between Zamora and Rodriguez where both players, though chronologically separated by an age gap, learn from one another on their approach to songwriting and the roots sounds brought to the table for their projects, Curandera Volume 1 provided a whole new level of working together as a unit.

“I had never really been hands on with the process like this album,” says Rodriguez of logging over 70 hours in the studio with Zamora and Estrada. “He was ‘hands on’ alright,” laughs Zamora. “We have been together 24/7 for three months and we still kind of like each other.”

The album not only allowed Rodriguez to expand on his experiences in the studio, where previously he typically was in and out to record his accordion parts, but the process also afforded him an opportunity and the encouragement to branch out of his Tejano sounds that he’s most known for.

“He needed to find his footing and it started with playing outside of the tejano box for him and playing rock and roll, country and folk music,” says Zamora. “I promised him it would do nothing but help his playing and it has.”

“Especially to work with Cougar,” adds Rodriguez of the learning process and newfound appreciation for the entire songwriting and recording process. “He’s something else. It was my first time in a studio watching pretty much from beginning to end and the way Cougar’s ideas as a producer were, it was just exciting to watch him and Tony.”

Curandera not only pushed the musical boundaries for Rodriguez but for the whole band as it sees them take a more rock and roll and blues direction than in their previous albums creating new sounds and building further upon their always down-home feeling songs.

“That was by design,” admits Zamora of the pushing of musical genre boundaries for this project. “My idea from the very get go was to combine country, folk and Mexican music together and put a big giant Gulf Coast influence on it.”

Tremoloco will perform on Thursday, May 4 at Shoeshine Charley's Big Top Lounge, 3714 Main, doors at 8 p.m, $10 and on May 7 at Cowboy Surfer, 827 Frostwood, 7 p.m, $20.