Neo Plena and Bomba Groove are here to stay. Here's how Puerto Rico's music scene is evolving.
Welcome to Primera Persona, where we explore reflections deeply connected to Puerto Rico, the kind that give you a good feeling in your heart.
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Thanks to Bad Bunny and his new album "Debí tirar más fotos", the floodgates have opened for contemporary plena and bomba. These are underground music scenes that have been building with force long before Benito, but his most recent album lifts them to a global stage. It feels like a new chapter in Puerto Rico's musical history is beginning.
Listening to the album, I loved being able to identify sounds and styles I've been hearing in the independent Puerto Rican music scene for the past 25 years, a scene I'm part of as an artist with my projects Piquete and La Mio. Hearing Chuwi y los Pleneros de la Cresta accompany el Conejo on this album is exciting for anyone who follows this new wave of Puerto Rican music. I also felt the street-corner plena at full force — they managed to capture that street energy.
This generation has a very different musical experience from that of a Puerto Rican in the 1950s or '60s. That's why our plena and bomba today are different, and that matters because it tells us our rhythms are still alive and evolving. We need to make room for the younger and emerging artists coming up, because the music they're making is as Puerto Rican as what's called "música de antaño"; one doesn't take away from the other, both belong to our country. And that's what Benito just did: make room for the new sounds of Puerto Rican plena and bomba.
I call the new ways of playing plena and its traditional instruments Neo Plena. Variations in how it's sung, song structures, experimentation with the basic rhythmic pattern — breaking it without losing the foundation — sonic fusions that introduce other kinds of accompaniment, and even the visual aesthetic of how a plenero or plenera looks. And yes, our scene now has many more women than before.
The same happens with Puerto Rican bomba, but unlike plena, which has a single rhythm, bomba has countless rhythmic patterns and many regional variations. That's why I call it Bomba Groove: because everything that can be fused and/or experimented with happens on top of the groove created by the sound of the bomba barrel and its varied patterns.
With the boom of what's called urban music, new electronic music technologies, and programming as a creative tool, we can identify a new sound in our rhythms. Urban salsa, like folkloric and rural music, is a phenomenon growing worldwide. La salsa choke from Colombia and timba cubana are examples of the new sounds of salsa, as is the new Latino folk, a term used internationally. The use of autotune and other programmable tools such as synthesizers, and the much-criticized use of "sequences," have already entered globally recognized tropical genres. This is already a reality. It's not that traditional ways of making salsa and more orchestrated rhythms are going to disappear; it's that there's another alternative that works and preserves the essence of the genres.
So if you're enjoying Benito's album, here are 11 Puerto Rican artists and musical projects that work with our rhythms from a contemporary, urban-electronic perspective. If you liked the production on "Debí tirar más fotos," these projects will definitely interest you.
1. Mima
A pioneer of Puerto Rican indie music, she has released two albums: Mima (2005) and El pozo (2011), along with several singles. She has stood out as a singer-songwriter for the versatility of her sound and her "ajibará" voice. Her songs draw on aguinaldos, plenas and reggae, with the cuatro puertorriqueño and the guicharo featured prominently.
2. Piquete
Piquete describes itself as neo plena and bomba groove: Puerto Rican street music. These rhythms are fused with an urban sensibility, anchored by a traditional Afro-Puerto Rican, female-led percussion section. They were finalists in NPR's Tiny Desk Contest 2022 Top Shelf.
3. La MiO
La MiO is a plenera, composer, dancer and leader of the band Piquete. She released her first solo album in July 2024, "Con to's los powers," a 15-track production that blends bomba, plena, rap, cumbia and other Caribbean and urban genres.
4. Chamir Bonano
Chamir Bonano is one of the leading figures in Puerto Rican bomba. Known as "La voz dulce de la bomba," she recently released her first studio album, A Mi Plin, which fuses bomba with urban sounds including trap, reggae and salsa.
5. Imbuyé
Hanzen & Ralex blend urban music with other Afro-Caribbean rhythms, backed by an 11-piece band. Julito, who was part of the musical production for the salsa tracks on the album "Debí tirar más fotos," is one of their percussionists.
6. El Hijo de Borikén
Emilito Castao and el Genio de Luquillo. The best rap duo in Puerto Rico right now. They fuse rap with plena, salsa, bomba and other Caribbean rhythms.
7. Julio del Hoyo y Las Quenepas
Las Quenepas, a university music collective, joins Julio del Hoyo to create a fresh sound that moves from aguinaldo to plena and from bomba to trap, salsa and reggaeton.
8. Jomar Santana
Jomar is a trombonist, dancer and plenero. He is a member of El laberinto del Coco and Emplegoste. He releases his first EP in February. He blends plena, salsa and bomba with a romantic, danceable touch.
9. David Rivera y la Bámbula
Their music fuses tropical music with genres such as R&B, jazz and gospel, among other styles including funk. A 13-member band led by their drummer, with salsa, plena and boogaloo with an urban tumbao at the forefront.
10. Lizbeth Román
A Puerto Rican artist known for capturing the poetry of everyday life and blending, musically, the bohemian with the alternative, Caribbean folk rhythms with feeling, blues, trap, trova and bomba, among others, calling her style "tropical cosmic folk." She was a finalist in NPR's Tiny Desk Concert 2023 Top Shelf.
11. El Batajohn
A plena collective led by John Butler, who has collaborated with many urban artists and has several reggaeton tracks. They stand out for keeping a street plena sound in their live shows. Guapería.
I'll leave you with two playlists on Spotify, one of NEO Plena and one of Bomba Groove, where you'll discover a lot of artists and projects that have been working on these new sounds for some time.
The author is an artist and creator of the cultural platform and calendar ¡DímeloMio!
This content was translated with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
