There are few countries with an auditory cuisine as rich and flavorful as Colombia’s.

Even its folkloric styles are as likely to induce spontaneous hip convulsions as the wave of contemporary dance music that’s surging out of the country right now. Not only in Colombia but across Latin America, a new generation of producers – brought up on healthy diets of classic Latin musical styles – are taking local urban genres and synthesizing them with electronic forms from abroad, borrowing elements from techno, drum and bass, UK breakbeat, dub and IDM, to name but a few. The results range from bass-driven grooves, like King Doudou and GЯEG’s “Dembow Tronico;” through raptor house tracks, like “Cabo E” from DJ Babatr; to glitchy head music like El Chico Callad’s “Tehuacan,” released on Mexican label NAAFI – Beatport's Label of the Month this past September.

Latin Club and Latincore

Typically the music being produced by this Latin cohort, with its complex rhythms and syncopated beats, is referred to as Latin Club, though acceptance of this term ranges from tentative to a stance of outright disdain among those helping to shape the scene. The problem lies in its attempt to universally classify a range of sounds as diverse as Latin America itself. In doing so, it only highlights the prevailing Eurocentricity around dance music, with anything falling outside of recognised standards apparently requiring a geographic qualifier.

Where the classification “Latin club” fails to deliver on homogeneity, its offshoot Latincore is slightly more successful. The style can be defined a little more easily thanks to a tendency towards frantic pace and twitchy beats. “A key element of Latincore is the strong kicks, the percussive hits that feel very reminiscent of hardcore. These elements blend together like in a blender, mixed with samples, beats, and rhythmic foundations from Latin American club music like dembow, reggaetón, guaracha, or cumbia,” says Bogota-based Maria Manuela, who released "Leonor" and "Guayoteo Borojó" in collaboration with fellow Bogotano Brenda on LOVE IN THE ENDZ.

Similar to those piled into the Latin club bracket, Latincore tracks often feature modified samples and instrumentation from traditional Latin music, combining them with other electronic elements. “The concept keeps evolving right now” says Colombian producer CRRDR, who has released tracks like “Tu Si No” and “La Plata,” the latter featuring a vocal sample from the legendary vallenato singer Diomedes Diaz. ““For me now, it's basically the mixture of Latin-influenced rhythms and high-BPM-ranged electronic music: mostly techno, trance, and drum and bass fused with samples based on cumbia, salsa, and reggaeton.”

This confluence of electronic production techniques with folkloric and urban musical styles from Latin America is nothing new. During the mid-2000s the label ZZK helped popularize what became known as digital cumbia, releasing tracks by artists like Chancha via Circuito and Animal Chuki from Buenos Aires and Lima respectively. As the name suggests, the genre’s earliest releases were inspired by traditional mid 20th-century cumbia from Colombia – as well as its cross-border interpretations from Peru, Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Bolivia – though it quickly evolved to include a much broader range of influences and left the digital cumbia tag behind.

The Spread and Influence of Digital Cumbia

Typified by the use of Guacharacas and Güiras – wooden and metal scraping instruments – cumbia is recognizable for its percussive instrumentation, distinctive rhythms, and syncopated beats, driven by bassy drums of African origin. Its sound is marked by an interplay between the steady percussion and the melodic elements, creating a lively and transmissible groove. These elements, as well as those from other Latin musical styles like reggaeton and guaracha, are traits that mark tracks such as Nick Leon’s “Grito”, released on TraTraTrax, and "Drop It Down" from Fumaratto and Baztez.

While modified reggaeton and guaracha beats are perhaps more prevalent than any other modern trait in Latin club and Latincore music, cumbia is up there as the most impactful traditional style, contributing many subtle elements such as vocal samples, cowbells, and wind instruments. For a genre that was historically maligned and ignored by the musical press, the scope of influence of this folkloric style from the Colombian coastline is quite impressive. It has a long history of cross-border pollination that even precedes the spread of digital cumbia, gaining a fanbase across Latin America.

In each location it assumed local accents and characteristics, such as the psychedelic slant and use of electric guitars in Lima’s “chicha” iteration and Monterrey’s “cumbias rebajadas,” which slowed down classic tracks to create a distorted and hypnotic sound. These unique variations have all had their own influence on Latin dance music as part of cumbia’s modern collective identity.

The Emergence of Traditional Cumbia

Like its international dissemination, the genesis of Cumbia is a much-fabled musical phenomenon: “It is common to tie individual instruments, styles, or elements of styles to particular racialized origins: the maracas are indigenous, the drums are African, the lyrics are Spanish,” says Peter Wade, now professor of Social Anthropology at Manchester university, in “Music, Race, and Nation,” his seminal research book. He adds, “Whatever the oversimplification of cultural hybridization, the end result is the constant reiteration of the founding myth of Colombian nationality.”

This theory has become so entrenched to the extent that the continuation of the story of cultural and racial mix and how it conversely represents Colombian unity is emphasized more than the innovation of the well-established Costeño communities (those hailing from coastal regions of Colombia) – a case of the ingredients becoming more famous than the recipe. Wade points out that “There is a tendency to project styles such as porro and vallenato and, even more, cumbia back into the past, assuming continuity rather than examining it.… The point is that these continuist arguments always get pride of place. When change is recognized, it is seen as the reestablishment of the dominance of tradition…”

Colombia’s Costeño population has been established along the Caribbean and Pacific coastlines and the banks of the Magdalena river for centuries. While the instrumentation and rhythms that characterize cumbia have diverse cultural inputs, its essence is unmistakably Costeño. During the middle decades of the 20th century, their music came to define a nation, representing unity across geographical and racial lines. But as its heyday passed, and with the arrival of the ’90s, cumbia and other national treasures such as porro and bambuco saw a domestic decline, with less original songs being produced and the popularity of tropi-pop, reggaeton, champeta and imported music taking its place in the hearts of the younger generations. Despite the sexual subversiveness of reggaeton and champeta, collectively these styles were in many ways a continuation of the conservative, hetronormative ideals that had long characterized traditional musical styles in Colombia.

Revival and Renewal

Now, the new generation of Colombian and Latin electronic artists are helping to revive the sense of community that older styles once fostered, but on their own terms, creating a new wave of Latin music for a diverse audience and creating inclusive and gender-fluid spaces. Take House of Tupamaras, a prominent queer collective in Bogotá, known for their voguing performances and role in shaping the local LGBTQ+ nightlife and ballroom scene, or Putivuelta, a party in the Colombian capital that challenges the exclusivity of traditional Latin club culture. Before relocating to Berlin, CRRDR, real name Franscisco Corredor, was actively involved in this all-welcoming DIY scene. “Bogota is super open-minded in certain communities” he reflects. “Everyone is into the party just for going to dance and having a good time. We started just building spaces for the music, then we connected. In Bogota specifically, this Latincore, latin club, guaracha scene started through queer parties.”

Similar things are happening in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Lima, São Paulo and other Latin American hubs. But it’s not just the international queer scenes which have helped shape the Latin dance music sphere. Social media and music-sharing platforms not only facilitate community building but also reflect the world that many young Latin artists experience: “If you see the aesthetics of many of the producers, it's always about the meme, the internet, cheap posts, because it's super trashy, super fast, it's super internet-ish. It's all about the internet scene that built up and came into a physical place that was these types of parties,” says CRRDR, who also credits the high-BPM internet remix genre “nightcore” for helping to inspire Latincore.

For Manuela, “Latincore is a product of countless influences. It’s fueled by Latin American club music, but also by the frantic pace of modern life. It’s as if everything in our daily lives – Instagram, TikTok, memes, Twitter, even how ADHD manifests in Gen Z and Alpha – gets woven into the fabric of this genre. It’s music that reflects the fast-paced world we live in.”

Building a Self-sustaining Scene

Thanks to the internet, Latin artists, labels and fans are all able to interact and participate in scene-building, despite huge geographic distances and vast variations in musical styles. But that doesn’t necessarily guarantee the future of Latin club or Latincore, according to Manuela: “For me, evolution doesn’t always mean moving forward – sometimes it means stopping, regressing, or questioning oneself and the environment. I think it’s necessary to doubt what’s happening and explore different paths, even if that means going backward or breaking away from what we consider progress.”

Even as their own gatekeepers acknowledge that the terms Latin club and Latincore may yet turn out to be as ephemeral as predecessors like Latin bass, there is consensus around one key objective: “it's to keep building a scene and a community,” says CRRDR, who in a recent set for Kiosk Radio held up his phone and allowed a message that read “LATINX MUSIC IS NOT A TREND” to scroll across the screen. He adds “and if there are more people producing this sound, it's building this circular economy that supports all of us and is not depending on other people or big machineries.”

It’s a mentality that puts the focus on Latin people playing Latin music. While of course Latin producers would embrace non-Latin DJs dropping the occasional track in their sets, there is always the danger that their art could suffer from the same forms of cultural extractivism that other elements of Latin society have historically endured. “That's the thing with colonialism and all of the social stuff. Obviously, when you get the social validation – we call it the white validation – then everyone loves it,” muses CRRDR. “Years ago reggaeton wasn't cool, but now the Global North is approving that. With guaracha it was the same stuff – DJs that were shading guaracha and Latincore producers. Now they're like, ‘Oh, this is cool. We want to bug you and play your music.’”

Latincore isn’t just a spin-off of an obscure internet genre, nor is Latin Club only a convenient term that helps to connect people culturally, as cool as that particular aspect may be. “Genres like Cyberguaracha, Guaracha, Zamarreo, Bala, Tribal, Zapateo, Freseo, Baile funk, RKT, Raptor house, Raveton, and Jungleton are being lumped under this category,” notes Manuela. “While there’s value in that diversity, I think it’s important to remember that, at least for Latincore, the term originated in Latin America – not in the Global North. That gives it a cultural weight we shouldn’t forget.”

Recognizing Latin Innovators

Like Manuela, most of the people shaping this scene are based in Latin America, working against the odds in places where it is more difficult to make a living as an artist. Others, like CRRDR, move across continents, leaving behind their culture, friends and family in order to promote the music they love and carve out a niche for themselves. The internet connects these people, but so do their Latin identities, their struggles and their collective memory of Latin American music. The community they've built transcends the varied musical inputs that have coalesced to create Latin dance music's rich flavor profile, bestowing it with its true identity.

Just as the Costeños who concocted cumbia deserve the proper recognition for their pioneering musical contributions, so too does the group of Latin artists combining fresh and traditional ingredients into powerful new recipes, no matter how long the current descriptors last. In music as in life, tradition is always worthy of a certain degree of respect, but its dominance is something that should never be left unchecked.