We Speak Latin

Niko Rubio Takes Center Stage With Debut Album Late Night Swim

Published

1 hour ago

November 1, 2026

Niko Rubio. Photo via @holanikorubio.

Niko Rubio is stepping into the spotlight with late night swim, her debut album for Atlantic Records, which arrived on Friday, October 30, 2026. The Mexican and Salvadoran American singer and songwriter from Los Angeles heralded the album with a new single titled all i want is you, produced by her longtime collaborator, GRAMMY Award winning producer Lester Mendez, whose credits include Shakira and Santana. The song was written with Mendez and Birk Gjerlufsen and offers a glimpse of the trip hop driven sound shaping the record.

The album follows a remarkable run for its earlier singles. The song tokyo became the biggest streaming debut of her career, passing ten million total streams, and the record also includes the singles dream and kitty. Rubio fuses influences from London, Jamaica and her hometown of Los Angeles, layering psychedelic and introspective writing over reggae rhythms and alternative pop touches.

Rubio arrives at this moment with serious credentials as a writer for other artists. She wrote behind the scenes for artists including Gwen Stefani and The Warning, and co writing The Warning song Ego earned her a first ever Latin GRAMMY Award nomination. Talking about the debut, she said, “Finally feeling ready to put out my debut album is such a dream come true. I made this project with some of my favorite humans in the world.”

She marked release week with a hometown event at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles on Wednesday, October 28, featuring a conversation and a special live performance in the Clive Davis Theater. She then takes the album on the road with a California headline tour that begins Friday, December 4 at Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco and continues through Felton, Ventura, Los Angeles, Santa Ana and San Diego, with support from Olivia C. Dacal. With nearly one million monthly listeners on Spotify and more than forty million global streams, Rubio now claims center stage on her own terms.

We Speak Latin

Karen y Los Remedios Conjure Myth and Cumbia on Bestiaria

Published

15 minutes ago

November 1, 2026

We Speak Media

Karen y Los Remedios. Photo via @karenylosremedios.

Mexican trio Karen y Los Remedios have released Bestiaria, their second album, out through ZZK Records. The 12 track record runs 44 minutes and deepens the group’s signature blend of cumbia rebajada and Latin electronic music, the slowed, heavy cumbia pulse of northern Mexico stretched across synths, beats and Ana Karen G. Barajas’s commanding voice.

The trio is completed by Jonathan Muriel, known as Jiony, and Guillermo Berbeyer, known as Z.A.M.P.A. Together they build each song on Bestiaria around a female figure drawn from myth and folklore, so the album plays like a procession of archetypes, healers, spirits and creators stepping out of old stories and into the dance. Singles including Ninfa, Curandera, Satanás, Creación del Universo and Mayahuel map that world in advance, moving between the sacred and the playful without ever losing the groove underneath.

Bestiaria follows Silencio, the trio’s 2023 debut, and it arrived to immediate critical embrace: Bandcamp Daily named it Album of the Day on October 12, 2026. The record also extends a live run that has carried the group from Mexico City stages to festival bills abroad, their shows turning the slowed cumbia tempos into something close to ceremony. With Bestiaria, Karen y Los Remedios have made their most complete statement yet, an album where folklore is not decoration but structure, and where every myth walks in rhythm. Bestiaria is available now through ZZK Records. For listeners new to cumbia rebajada, it is an ideal entry point, and for longtime followers, a deepening of everything the trio does best.