Run out of the city into the jungle, with its buzzing insects, its saturated color. Its sloths and blossoms, its crazy chaos. There you’ll find Costa Rica’s Cocofunka, the regionally adored band whose latest album Chúcaro consciously mirrors the easygoing, lush vibe of their homeland’s rainforests.

“When we started developing our texture, we wanted to find the sound of the jungle here,” says Javier Arce, the band’s frontman. “It was a guideline for the music. If you make an album you wouldn’t play here, that’s not at home here, it’s not right.”

Produced by local icon Mario Miranda and Bomba Estereo’s sonic mastermind Felipe Alvarez, the dreamy album folds soca and calypso beats into rock and reggae, all to express the melancholy joy and wonderful heartache of living. To reflect the full range of influences on their music and scene, they invited Jamaican reggae icon Andrew Tosh (who appears on “Temprano”), Guatemalan-born singer Estefani Brolo, and Panamanian rock icon Lilo Sánchez (of Señor Loop), who wrote the uplifting lyrics for “Alma Valiente” after battling cancer.

Like Cocofunka’s previous work, it has a point, though it’s subtler than mere politics or social critique. “In the songs on Chúcaro, we’re trying to reflect an inner revolution, not our political outward stance,” notes Arce. “Nature is really present, as a metaphor and as an influence, and is represented with the delay, with the effects. The lyrics are more about the inner self, how people can question themselves about life and existence.”