Rawayana: The Life Story Behind the Venezuelan Pop Band
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On the second of February 2025, in a hall in Los Angeles, a Venezuelan singer stood on a stage holding a Grammy and spoke in rhyme. Alberto Montenegro, the frontman of Rawayana, had just watched his band become the first Venezuelan act to win a Grammy for Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album, for the record ¿Quién trae las cornetas? Instead of a plain thank-you speech, he named a dozen Venezuelan musicians in verse, one after another, and urged his countrymen to keep their heads up. It was a strange, moving, generous moment, and it told you more about Rawayana in two minutes than a biography could tell you in a chapter. This was a band that had won the biggest prize in its field and used the moment to point at everybody else.
Eighteen years earlier, none of that would have seemed possible. Rawayana began in Caracas in 2007, when four young men who had grown up in a mountain city fell in love with the music of the coast: reggae, Caribbean pop, and the slow, sunlit rhythms of the sea. Caracas sits high above the shore, and the beach is a drive away, but the sea was always in the city’s imagination, in its weekends, its holidays, and its songs. The four friends built a band out of that longing. They called their sound trippy Caribbean, a dreamy, swaying version of the music they had heard on family trips to the coast, and they sang it in Spanish with jokes, tenderness, and a lightness that stood out in a country going through hard times.
Their rise was slow, then sudden. A first album in 2011, a second in 2013, a third in 2016 that gave their sound its name, and then, in the early two thousands twenties, a run of records that carried them from small clubs to the biggest stages in Latin music: a Latin Grammy in 2024 for the song Feriado, a Grammy in 2025 for the album behind it, a Tiny Desk performance watched by millions, a slot at Coachella, and a whole new band, Astropical, formed with the Colombian group Bomba Estéreo. This is the story of how four friends from a mountain city learned to sing like the sea, and how the sea carried them further than they ever expected.
A Mountain City That Dreamed of the Sea
Caracas is not a beach city. It sits in a valley in the mountains, nearly a thousand metres above the Caribbean, and the road down to the coast winds through hills and tunnels before it reaches the water. But for the young people who grew up there, the coast was never far away. Weekends meant the beach at La Guaira or Higuerote, music from car radios, cold drinks, and the feeling that life could slow down for a day. Alberto Montenegro, known as Beto, grew up with that feeling, and so did the three friends who would form Rawayana with him: Andrés Story, called Fofo, on drums; Alejandro Abeijón, called Abeja, on bass; and Antonio Casas, called Tony, on guitar.
The four were still teenagers when Hugo Chávez won the presidency in 1998, and they came of age in a Venezuela that was changing fast around them. Industries were nationalised, politics grew sharper, and by the time they were old enough to start a band, the country they had grown up in was already becoming a harder place to live. Many of their friends would later leave. Some of them would leave too, in time. But in 2007, when they formed Rawayana, they were simply four young musicians in Caracas who wanted to play the music that made them feel happy, and the music that made them feel happy was reggae.
Reggae was an unusual choice for a Venezuelan band in 2007. The charts belonged to reggaeton, to pop ballads, and to the salsa that had ruled Caracas for decades. Reggae belonged to Jamaica, to the Caribbean islands, and to the beach towns the band visited on weekends. But the four friends heard something in it that fitted them: a slow, steady beat, a bass line that moved like a wave, and a voice that could be gentle without being weak. They began to play it their own way, mixing it with pop melodies, with Venezuelan humour, and with the Spanish of everyday Caracas. The result did not sound like a copy of a Jamaican band. It sounded like a Venezuelan band remembering the sea.
In those first years they played where young bands play: at parties, in small bars, and at gatherings of friends. Nobody paid them much, and nobody needed to. The shows were a way of learning, and the learning was the point. They discovered how a slow song can hold a room if the groove is honest, how a joke in a lyric can turn strangers into friends, and how a band that plays quietly can still be heard. They also discovered each other. Four people who make music together for years learn things about each other that no conversation can teach, and the trust they built in those early rooms would carry them through everything that came later.
Licencia para ser libre and the First Record
Rawayana’s first album, Licencia para ser libre, arrived in 2011, four years after the band formed. The title means a licence to be free, and it was a statement of intent. The band was not asking permission from the music industry. It was declaring that freedom was something you could claim for yourself, in a song, in a show, in a life. The record mixed reggae with pop and Caribbean rhythms, and it introduced listeners to a group that sounded relaxed in a way few Venezuelan bands did. Beto sang as if he were talking to a friend, the bass moved underneath him like a tide, and the guitar added bright, sunny lines that made the songs feel like good weather.
The album did not make them stars overnight. Venezuelan radio in 2011 had little room for a reggae band from Caracas, and the group built its audience the slow way, show by show, city by city. They played in Venezuela and then in neighbouring countries, and they learned how different audiences responded to the same songs. In Colombia, listeners heard the Caribbean in their music and claimed it as their own. In Mexico, audiences heard the pop melodies and sang along. Everywhere they went, the band collected a few more listeners, and those listeners told their friends. It was the oldest kind of success, built on people rather than on marketing.
What the first album proved, more than anything, was that the band could finish something. Many young groups talk about recording an album and never do. Rawayana did it, under their own independent label, Brocoli Records, and the fact of the record changed how they thought about themselves. They were no longer four friends jamming in a room. They were a band with a catalogue, with songs that strangers could find and play. That change matters, because it turns a hobby into a responsibility. Once your songs exist in the world, you have to decide what the next ones will say.
The years around the debut were also the years when Venezuela’s crisis deepened. The economy faltered, shortages appeared, and the friends of the band’s generation began to leave in large numbers. Rawayana stayed, and they kept playing, and their music began to mean something new to the people who heard it. A song about freedom, written in a country where freedom felt harder to find, was not only a pleasant tune. It was a small act of hope, and listeners heard it that way, even if the band never said so in as many words.
Rawayanaland and the Road Out of Venezuela
The second album, Rawayanaland, came out in 2013, and its title said what the band had become: not just a group, but a place. A listener who put on the record was entering a small country of the band’s own making, a place where the weather was warm, the pace was slow, and the troubles of the real world were kept at the door for an hour. The songs were warmer and more confident than the debut, and the band’s playing had tightened. Fofo’s drumming had settled into a steady, unhurried pulse. Abeja’s bass lines had become the spine of the sound. Tony’s guitar gave the records a brightness that made them easy to recognise within a few seconds.
Touring took them further now. They played across Latin America, and they began to understand that their audience was not only Venezuelan. Young listeners in Mexico, Colombia, and Spain heard the same thing in the music: a band that sang in Spanish about love, about the sea, and about taking life at a human pace. The band had not planned to be international. It had planned to be honest, and honesty turned out to travel well. A song about a slow day by the water means something different in Bogotá than it does in Caracas, but it means something in both places, and that was enough.
By the middle of the decade, the question of leaving Venezuela had become unavoidable. The crisis was no longer a background fact. It was the daily reality of power cuts, shortages, and friends departing for Madrid, Miami, or Buenos Aires. The band’s members faced the same choice as millions of their countrymen, and in time they too would live much of their lives outside Venezuela. But they carried the country with them in a way that mattered. They sang about it, they named it, and they refused to pretend it did not exist. For Venezuelans abroad, that refusal was a gift. Here was a band that had left and still sounded like home.
The move abroad changed the band’s working life in practical ways. They could record more easily, they could tour more widely, and they could reach audiences that had been out of reach from Caracas. But it also changed the emotional weight of the songs. A lyric about the beach, written by a musician living far from the beach, is no longer only a pleasant image. It is a memory, and memories are sharper than images. The band’s later records carry that sharpness, and listeners who have left home hear it at once.
Trippy Caribbean: Giving the Sound Its Name
In 2016 the band released its third album, Trippy Caribbean, and the title did what a good title should do: it told listeners exactly what they were about to hear. The Caribbean part was the rhythm, the reggae, the warmth, the sea. The trippy part was the dreaminess, the feeling that the music was slightly out of focus, like a memory of a holiday rather than the holiday itself. The record became one of their best-known works, and the phrase trippy Caribbean stuck to the band for the rest of its career, a shorthand for a sound that was both relaxed and a little strange.
The album’s songs were about love, about the water, and about the feeling of being free, and they were played on radio and in clubs across Latin America. But the record’s real achievement was subtler. It gave the band a language for talking about itself. Before Trippy Caribbean, Rawayana was a reggae band from Caracas, a description that fitted them but did not explain them. After it, they were a trippy Caribbean band, and the phrase carried the whole idea: Venezuelan, coastal, dreamy, and entirely their own. A band that can name its own sound has taken a step that many bands never take, because naming a sound means you know what it is, and knowing what it is means you can protect it.
The years after the album brought the band a wider audience and a busier calendar. They played festivals, they shared stages with artists they admired, and they began to work with other musicians. One of the most talked-about collaborations of this period was Veneka, a song made with the Venezuelan rapper Akapellah, which became a hit and showed that the band’s gentle sound could sit beside a rapper’s sharp verses without losing its character. The collaboration mattered because it connected Rawayana to a different part of Venezuelan music, the street, the slang, and the humour of the country’s young people, and it proved the band could listen as well as it could play.
By the end of the decade, Rawayana was no longer a small band from Caracas. It was one of the most loved new groups in Latin music, with a loyal audience spread across many countries, and with a sound that listeners could recognise within seconds. But the biggest chapters of its story were still ahead, and they would arrive in a form nobody in the band could have predicted: a record about uncertainty, a song about a holiday, and two awards that changed everything.
¿Dónde nos quedamos? and the Uncertain Years
The band’s fourth album, ¿Dónde nos quedamos?, arrived in 2021, and its title asked a question that many people were asking at the time: where are we now, where did we stop, where do we go next? The record came after years of touring, moving, and watching their country change from a distance, and it sounded more reflective than the albums before it. The grooves were still warm, the melodies were still bright, but the lyrics carried a new weight, the weight of people who had left home and were trying to work out what home meant now.
The timing mattered. The world had spent a year in pandemic lockdowns, and live music had stopped almost everywhere. A band that had built its career on playing rooms full of people suddenly had no rooms to play. Rawayana used the pause the way many artists did: they wrote, they recorded, and they thought about what their music was for. The album that came out of that pause was not a party record. It was a record about waiting, about distance, and about the strange feeling of being between one life and the next. Listeners who had spent the same year in their own flats, far from their own families, heard their own feelings in it.
The album also set up what came next. Its songs kept the trippy Caribbean sound, but they stretched it, adding electronic touches and funk rhythms that hinted at where the band was heading. The group had always mixed genres, but now the mixing became bolder. A song could start as reggae and end somewhere else entirely, and the band trusted its audience to follow. That trust was about to pay off, because the next record would take the same restless spirit and turn it into the most successful album of their career.
It is worth remembering how uncertain those years felt for Venezuelan artists. The country’s crisis had scattered its musicians across the world, and there was no single scene left to belong to. A band from Caracas now meant a band whose members lived in different cities, whose fans lived in a dozen countries, and whose home existed mostly in memory and in song. ¿Dónde nos quedamos? gave that scattered feeling a name and a sound, and it prepared the ground for a record that would answer its own question with a leap into the unknown.
¿Quién trae las cornetas? and the Leap
The fifth album, ¿Quién trae las cornetas?, was released in 2023, and its title asked a playful question: who is bringing the horns, who is bringing the party? The record opened with a line about leaping into the void of life, with or without a parachute, and that image captured the whole album. It was a record about confronting uncertainty, about jumping even when you cannot see where you will land, and it was written by four men who had spent years living with uncertainty themselves. The sound was their widest yet, mixing tropical pop with electric funk, reggae with electronic beats, and Spanish lyrics that moved between jokes and confessions.
The album’s best-known song was Feriado, a warm, swaying track about a holiday, about stopping work and celebrating a day that belongs to you. The song’s writers included Beto, Fofo, and two collaborators, Manuel Lorente Freire and Héctor Mazzarri, with Daniel Rondón also credited, and its gentle groove made it an instant favourite. It was not a loud song. It did not shout. It moved at the pace of a good day, and listeners who heard it felt as if they had been given permission to rest. In a world that is always asking people to work harder and move faster, a song that says you deserve a day off is a radical thing, and audiences responded to it at once.
The recognition came quickly. In November 2024, at the Latin Grammy Awards in Miami, Feriado won the Latin Grammy for Best Pop Song, the band’s first Latin Grammy. The ceremony marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the awards, and the win told the Latin music world that Rawayana was no longer a promising new band. It was a serious act, with songs that other musicians respected and that listeners loved. The band had waited seventeen years for that moment, and when it arrived, it arrived for a song about taking a break, which seemed fitting for a group that had always played at the speed of a good day.
Then came the bigger prize. In February 2025, at the sixty-seventh Grammy Awards, ¿Quién trae las cornetas? won the Grammy for Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album, making Rawayana the first Venezuelan act to win in that category. Beto’s rhymed speech, naming a dozen Venezuelan musicians and urging his countrymen to keep going, became one of the most talked-about moments of the night. The band had also been nominated for a Grammy before the win, and the nomination alone had been a milestone. The win turned the milestone into history. A group that had started in Caracas in 2007, playing reggae in small bars, now held a Grammy, and it had won it with a record about leaping into the void.
Astropical, Coachella, and the Tiny Desk
Success on that scale changes a band’s calendar, and Rawayana’s calendar in 2025 filled fast. The group was confirmed for Coachella, one of the biggest festivals in the United States, a stage that few Venezuelan acts had ever reached. Their NPR Tiny Desk performance, recorded in the small office studio that has become a rite of passage for serious musicians, gathered millions of views, with listeners praising the warmth of the playing and the ease of the band on camera. A Tiny Desk is a hard test, because there is nowhere to hide: no lights, no big stage, only the songs and the musicians. Rawayana passed it the way they pass most tests, by sounding like themselves.
The most surprising development of 2025 was a new band altogether. Li Saumet of the Colombian group Bomba Estéreo reached out about a single, the collaboration went so well that the two groups recorded a whole album together, and the result was Astropical, a supergroup combining Rawayana with Bomba Estéreo. The project kicked off with a tour that began in Mexico City, and it showed a side of Rawayana that the Grammy had only hinted at: a band confident enough to share its name, its stage, and its songs with another group entirely. For a band built on friendship, joining a second family of musicians felt natural.
Through all of this, the band kept its independent footing. Brocoli Records, the label they had built themselves, remained their home, and the group continued to make decisions on its own terms. That independence mattered, because it meant the Grammy wins belonged to them, not to a company that had shaped their sound. They had chosen their own records, their own collaborators, and their own pace, and the industry had come to them, not the other way around. It was the same freedom they had claimed in the title of their first album, Licencia para ser libre, only now the licence had been stamped by the biggest awards in music.
Today Rawayana stands as the most successful Venezuelan band of its generation, and as a voice for the Venezuelans who left home and still listen for it in song. Their records are played in flats in Madrid, in Miami, in Mexico City, and in Caracas itself, by listeners who hear in them the coast, the holidays, and the slow days they miss. The four friends from 2007 are still at the centre of it, joined on tour by musicians like the percussionist Orestes Gómez, and still playing the music they loved as teenagers. The leap into the void, it turns out, landed them somewhere extraordinary.
My Take:
The first thing I feel when I listen to Rawayana is a slowing down, and I mean that as the highest praise I can give a band. So much music today is in a hurry. It shouts, it rushes, it demands your attention in the first three seconds or it loses you. Rawayana does the opposite. The songs move at the pace of a warm afternoon, the bass walks instead of running, and Beto sings as if he has all the time in the world. I find that calming in a way that is hard to explain. It reminds me that life is not only about speed and output, and that a song can be a place to rest rather than another thing to keep up with.
I think the Grammy speech in February 2025 tells you who this band is better than any review could. Beto stood on a stage in Los Angeles, holding the biggest prize his band had ever won, and he used his two minutes to name a dozen other Venezuelan musicians in rhyme. He did not talk about himself. He did not list his own achievements. He pointed at everybody else, and he told his countrymen to keep their heads up. I have watched award speeches where the winner thanks their manager and leaves. This one was different. It was a speech by a man who knew that his win belonged to a whole scattered country, and who refused to enjoy it alone. That generosity is rare, and it is the reason I trust this band.
Feriado is the song I keep returning to, because it says something simple that most of us forget. It says you deserve a day off. Not a day off because you have earned it by working yourself to exhaustion, but a day off because you are a person and days off are part of being alive. I think about the people I know who work until they are ill, who never take a holiday, who treat rest as laziness. This song disagrees with them, gently, with a groove instead of a lecture. It won a Latin Grammy, and I am glad it did, because the win says that the music world still has room for a soft song with a kind message. A gentle song can win a big prize. That matters, and I hope young songwriters hear it.
What moves me most about Rawayana is the way they carry Venezuela without turning it into a slogan. They do not wave a flag in every song. They sing about the coast, about holidays, about love and distance, and Venezuela is inside all of it, quietly, the way home is inside everything you do when you have left it. I imagine a young Venezuelan in Madrid, playing Trippy Caribbean in a small flat, and feeling a little less far from the beach at La Guaira. The band does not promise that the flat will become the beach. It only offers a song that remembers the beach, and sometimes remembering is enough to get through a hard evening. That is a modest kind of comfort, and it is an honest one.
I also admire the patience of their career. Seventeen years passed between the band forming in 2007 and the Latin Grammy in 2024. Seventeen years of small rooms, slow growth, and records that built an audience one listener at a time. Most bands would have quit, or changed their sound to chase a trend, or split up in frustration. Rawayana kept the same sound, kept the same four members, and kept trusting that the audience would find them. When the Grammy arrived in 2025, it did not arrive as a surprise to the people who had been listening all along. It arrived as confirmation of something they had known for years. I think that kind of patience is becoming rare, and I think it is worth celebrating.
The title of their first album, Licencia para ser libre, a licence to be free, stays in my mind, because the band has spent its whole career living up to those words. They released their records on their own label, Brocoli Records. They chose their own collaborators. They formed a whole new band, Astropical, with Bomba Estéreo, because the music led them there, not because a company told them to. Freedom in music is often talked about and rarely practised. This band practised it, and the practice paid off in the most concrete way possible: two of the biggest awards in music, won on their own terms. I think young artists should look at that and understand that independence is not only a romantic idea. It can be a practical one too.
I want to say something about the sound itself, because trippy Caribbean is a phrase that could easily have been a gimmick, and it is not. The dreaminess in the music is real, and it comes from somewhere specific. It comes from remembering the sea from a mountain city, from hearing the coast in your head when you are far from it, from the way a holiday feels brighter in memory than it did at the time. The band understood that feeling and turned it into a style. The records sound like memories, warm at the edges, a little blurred, and all the more moving for it. I have heard bands try to sound dreamy by adding effects and noise. Rawayana sounds dreamy by writing songs about things that are worth dreaming about.
There is a sadness in their story that I do not want to skip, because it is part of what makes the music honest. The Venezuela they grew up in is not the Venezuela of today. The country went through a crisis that scattered millions of people, and the band’s members lived through that scattering themselves. Their songs do not ignore it. They answer it with warmth, with humour, and with the idea that joy is still possible when life is hard. I do not think that is naive. I think it is brave. It is easy to write angry songs about a hard world. It is harder to write warm songs about a hard world, and to mean them. Rawayana means them, and that is why their music comforts people instead of only describing their pain.
I think about the Tiny Desk performance, because it shows what this band is made of. A Tiny Desk is a small room, a few cameras, and no place to hide. There are no lights, no big stage, no crowd to carry you. You either have the songs or you do not. Rawayana had the songs, and millions of people watched them play, and the comments were full of listeners who had never heard of the band before and were suddenly fans. That is how a real band grows in the modern world: not only through awards, but through a small video that shows the music is honest. I am glad the performance found such a wide audience, because it deserved to.
The Astropical project is the part of their story that excites me most about the future. A band that has just won a Grammy could easily have become careful, protecting its sound and its brand. Instead, Rawayana joined another band, shared the stage, and made a whole album with Bomba Estéreo. That takes confidence, and it takes generosity. It says that the band is not interested in guarding what it has. It is interested in making more music, with more people, in more places. I hope the tour and the album reach as many listeners as the Grammy did, because a collaboration like that is a reminder that music is at its best when it is shared.
If I had to choose one record to give to a stranger, I would give them ¿Quién trae las cornetas?, because it holds the whole band in one place: the leap into the void, the holiday song, the funk, the reggae, the jokes, and the confessions. Then I would tell the stranger to listen to Feriado on a day when they are tired, and to notice how the song slows them down. That is what this band does best. It does not rush you. It gives you a day, a beach, and a reason to breathe, and it does it with a groove that stays in your head long after the song ends.
I also think this band teaches something about where you come from and where you can go. They came from Caracas, a city in the mountains, and they sang about the sea. They came from a country in crisis, and they won a Grammy. They came from small bars, and they played Coachella. None of that was guaranteed. All of it came from playing the music they loved, in their own way, for a long time, without giving up. I think about young musicians in Venezuela today, and in other countries where life is hard, and I hope they hear this story. Where you start does not decide where you finish. What decides it is whether you keep playing, keep writing, and keep trusting the sound that is yours.
In the end, I think Rawayana’s legacy is still being written, and that is part of what makes them exciting. They have already won the awards, played the festivals, and formed the supergroup, but they are still a young band, still writing, still touring, still finding new collaborators. The leap into the void that opened their fifth album has not ended. It is still happening, one song at a time. I will be listening to see where it lands next, and I think many others will be listening too. A band that can slow you down, make you smile, and remind you of home, all in the same song, is a band worth following wherever it goes next.
I also think about the songwriting itself, and about how hard it is to write a lyric that is both simple and true. Feriado is not a complicated song. Its idea fits in a single sentence: take a day off, enjoy it, you have earned it by being alive. But simplicity like that is the hardest thing to write, because there is nowhere to hide. A complicated song can impress people with its cleverness. A simple song has to move them with its honesty, and if the honesty is missing, the song falls flat. Feriado does not fall flat. It moves people because the feeling behind it is real, and because the band believed in the feeling enough to write it plainly. I think songwriters who are starting out should study that. You do not need a clever idea. You need a true one, written clearly.
There is another part of their story that I find quietly remarkable, and it is the stability of the four members. Four friends formed a band in 2007, and the same four are still at the centre of it nearly twenty years later, through a move abroad, through a pandemic, through a Grammy win, and through the launch of a second band. That kind of stability is rare in music, and it does not happen by accident. It happens because people learn to listen to each other, to forgive mistakes, and to keep the work ahead of their egos. I do not know the details of their disagreements, and I do not need to. The fact that they are still together, still writing, and still excited enough to start a new project with Bomba Estéreo tells me everything I need to know about how they treat each other.
I think about the younger listeners too, the teenagers in Latin America who are discovering Rawayana now, through a streaming playlist or a Tiny Desk video, and who have never been to Venezuela and may never go. For them, the band is not a memory of home. It is a discovery, a sound that feels warm and new. That matters, because it means the band’s future does not depend only on nostalgia. A teenager in Mexico City who falls in love with ¿Quién trae las cornetas? is not remembering a beach in La Guaira. She is hearing a record that speaks to her own life, her own friendships, her own need for a day off. A band that can reach both the exile remembering home and the teenager discovering something new is a band with a real future, and Rawayana has that reach.
One last thought stays with me, and it is about the speech again. Beto named a dozen Venezuelan musicians in rhyme, and he told his countrymen to keep their heads up. I think about the young musicians in Venezuela who heard that speech, in a country where being a musician is harder than it has ever been, and I think about what it must have meant to hear their names spoken on a Grammy stage. A win can be a private thing, a trophy on a shelf. This win was a public thing, a message to a whole country. That is the difference between a successful band and an important one, and Rawayana, in that moment, became important.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did Rawayana’s singer say in his Grammy acceptance speech?
When ¿Quién trae las cornetas? won the Grammy for Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album in February 2025, Alberto Montenegro gave a rhymed speech naming a dozen Venezuelan musicians and urging his countrymen to keep their heads up. The speech became one of the most talked-about moments of the night.
Why is Rawayana’s music called trippy Caribbean?
The phrase comes from their third album, Trippy Caribbean, released in 2016. The Caribbean part describes the reggae rhythms and coastal warmth, while the trippy part describes the dreamy, slightly hazy feeling of the songs, like a memory of a holiday rather than the holiday itself.
Which Rawayana song won a Latin Grammy?
Feriado, a warm song about taking a holiday and enjoying a day that belongs to you, won the Latin Grammy for Best Pop Song in November 2024. The song appears on the album ¿Quién trae las cornetas?, which went on to win a Grammy in 2025.
What is Astropical?
Astropical is a supergroup formed by Rawayana together with the Colombian band Bomba Estéreo. The collaboration began with a single, grew into a whole album, and led to a tour that started in Mexico City in 2025. The project came about after Li Saumet of Bomba Estéreo reached out to Rawayana.
How did Rawayana perform on NPR’s Tiny Desk?
Their Tiny Desk performance, recorded in the small office studio used for the series, gathered millions of views and won praise for the warmth of the playing. The format is a hard test for a band, because there is no big stage or lighting to hide behind, only the songs and the musicians.
Where can a new listener start with Rawayana?
A good starting point is the album ¿Quién trae las cornetas? from 2023, which includes Feriado and shows the band’s widest range of sounds. From there, Trippy Caribbean from 2016 is the record that gives the band’s style its name, and Licencia para ser libre from 2011 shows where it all began.
