Beto Montenegro is currently nursing a cup of tea in a ski locker room in the French Alps. At 36, he is accustomed to building worlds in uncanny places — a fitting skill for the leader of a band that has spent a career creating musical refuges to weather Venezuela’s sociopolitical storms. He adjusts his signature curls staring into the camera, ready to discuss the seismic shifts in both his art and his country.
The road to this moment has been defined by unprecedented heights and challenges. The Caracas-born collective—formed by Montenegro, Andrés “Fofo” Story, Alejandro “Abeja” Abeijón, and Antonio “Tony” Casas—released their debut album, Licencia Para Ser Libre (License To Be Free), in 2011. Joining a diaspora of over 8 million people — roughly a fourth of Venezuela’s population — most of the band members left the country in the wake of economic and political crises that marked the lyrics of their 2021 record Cuando Los Acéfalos Predominan (When the Acephalous Prevail.)
Since then, their ascent has been meteoric: Rawayana secured their first Grammy win for their international breakout album ¿Quién Trae Las Cornetas? in 2025, followed by a major set at Coachella dedicated to their home country. President Nicolás Maduro, then facing widespread allegations of electoral fraud for 2024 elections, had forced them to cancel their domestic tour after a public rebuke of their viral hit-turned-migrant anthem, “Veneka.” While hitting such a peak in the band’s career, Montenegro started obsessing over the future.
Eventually, he and the band came up with ¿Dónde Es El After?, the alternative band’s most upbeat and provocative project to date. Released on New Year’s Day, it’s a danceable, mainstream-leaning record that enlists reggaeton icons Jowell & Randy and Justin Quiles, Colombian pop-urban star Manuel Turizo, and regional Mexican heavyweights Carín León and Grupo Frontera (a collaboration orchestrated by multi-Latin-Grammy-winning producer Edgar Barrera.) In the process, they even found a new musical sound: “venetón,” a self-christened fusion of contemporary tropical and urban sounds that challenges traditional boundaries of Latin music.
Conceptually, the 23-track LP poses what seems like a simple question: Where do we meet once the party ends? But with Rawayana, depth is always masked by lightness. With the agility of a cultural trickster, Montenegro — who also serves as the project’s creative director — teases a more complex inquiry: How does the way we inhabit the present shape our future?
For Rawayana, living the present has granted them unexpected foresight. The album’s overture is pointed: “Un feliz año te desea Rawa, y que por fin los hijos de puta ya se vayan” (Rawa wishes you a happy New Year, and may the sons of bitches finally leave). A few days after the record dropped, Maduro was captured during a U.S. military operation in Caracas and later charged in New York with drug trafficking and narco-terrorism. ¿Dónde Es El After?, with its novel sounds and defiant spirit, now feels like something far beyond Rawayana’s characteristic escapism. It has become a prophetic party challenging a fate that, for them, remains inextricably tied to their home country.
This is Rawayana’s eighth studio album. How are you feeling about the release?
I’m happy. Since I was a kid, I have always loved the New Year holiday. For many years, we’ve wanted to release an album on Jan. 1 because it is a date when people aren’t normally working. I think it’s an interesting date because we’re all kind of resetting many things.
This album has been a resetting process in many ways for our project, our music, and our proposal. I like it a lot conceptually when you ask yourself: “What comes next?” Whether in a context where you are having a good time or when you are having a hard time, there’s something about manifesting and organizing there. It’s this conflict of always thinking, naturally as human beings, about what comes next. That can be seen from a negative perspective as well as a positive one. Hence the album title: ¿Dónde Es El After? (Where Is The After?) What comes next?
There are those who say you have predictive powers — but we’ll save that for later. For now, what was the thinking behind the decision to drop this album in Madrid on New Year’s Day?”
The album comes with several slogans. One is “Welcome to the future.” It’s an album that points out many contradictions. Because Madrid is in the future, the end of the year is celebrated before our time zone. We really liked the idea that we were planning this from the future.
You mentioned that the intention was for people to listen to the album in order. What experience did you want to create?
First, there is a layer of reality in terms of what has been going on with us in recent times. Such cool things have happened to us. We’ve taken the time to celebrate, and basically, we feel like the album is a celebratory album. Although there are many things that have been taken from us for many years, we have also gained a lot. I think we share that with a lot of people. Although life takes things away from us, it also gives us a lot.
Listening to it in order tells you a little bit why we’re taking the rhythm where we’re taking it and how we’re planning to celebrate in our own way. So people can understand why there is a reggaeton or a dembow — or a form of them — because it’s not strictly faithful to what those genres are. It is important to hear it in order to understand that context.
The album is punctuated by these recurring female voices pleading to hear reggaeton. And yet, you led the release with “Reyimiller” and “La Noche Que No Había Uber,” tracks that sparked a conversation about a brand-new sound. You’ve dubbed it “venetón.” What was the vision behind that new rhythm?
In the production process, we suddenly arrived at a sound that we felt we hadn’t heard before, and we didn’t know how to describe it. A lot of the process, beyond the conceptual, was very easy because it is a “joda” [fun] album. The lyrics are very humorous and we laughed a lot while writing the songs, but it was very important to us that you could dance to it.
The truth is, I feel like the industry is at a point where — and I don’t want to sound like a hater because I love everything people like — the way we dance has become a little monotonous. A lot of the decisions we made on this record are based on that: on what makes us move, and how we arrive at a sound that, through arrangements and production, would make us move.
At the sound level, our engineer is a guy who makes all the greatest dance music in the Latin world right now [Josh Gudwin is the records’ mixing engineer and Dale Becker mastering engineer]. There was a lot of intention behind it beyond the lyrics — this “sound thing” — to ensure there was a sound we could feel unique. Within the creative, we came to this idea of “venetón.” It describes that sophistication you feel when you see a brutalist building standing in the middle of the Venezuelan monte [wilderness]. It has that mix of everything: the wild, mixed with a certain sophistication and modernism.
It’s danceable, but it is less “perreo” than tropical, where do you locate it in terms of rhythm?
The Caribbean is very present. Many years ago, when we knew that Venezuela, at some point, was not going to be a possibility for us, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico became places that influenced us deeply.
What does it mean to collaborate with Jowell & Randy? Perhaps, from reggaeton OGs, Rawayana’s greatest collaboration so far. What does that mean to you?
It’s very beautiful because I feel that, and it bothers me a little,projects like ours have inherited a kind of segregation in music. Maybe a band like us, 15 or 20 years ago, could not have done a feature like this because they didn’t grow up listening to reggaeton as we did. But we did; we grew up with that.
Being able to tear down that barrier with someone who you’ve been following since a very young age is something I think is very special. It is just as exciting as the first time we did something with Natalia Lafourcade. I feel the same way about this one because having people like Justin, or Jowell & Randy, believe in our project is nice. There’s a wall there that breaks, and I love that it doesn’t exist anymore.
What has Puerto Rico given to your songwriting and what’s the impact on this album?
I have a strange connection with Puerto Rico because my parents lived there when I was very young, so I was sold on the island from a very young age. It was the only place I ever lived besides Venezuela, and my favorite artists are from there. For many years, Puerto Rico has been a direct influence on everything I have done.
This is the second album we have produced there; half of ¿Quién Trae Las Cornetas? was produced there as well. I think it’s basically that freedom to write. Because of their cultural, social, and political situation, they have a freedom that they reflect in a way that makes the whole world fall in love with it. I have a lot of respect for that.
“Como De Sol A Sol,” the cumbia with Carín León and Grupo Frontera, was a surprise. How did it come about?
That song was made in Los Angeles. It’s not a Mexican cumbia, but let’s say it was Mexicanized. I have to give credit to Edgar Barrera, we’ve been working on some things with him, and when he heard this song, he was the one who brought Carín and Grupo along. Him and Casta…We loved it. It’s a Mexican-American exchange… Then, with Edgar, we wrote the last part of the song… It ended up being a lot cooler.
You also have “Magic Juan” (known as the “King of Merengue Hip-Hop”) with “Amor De Contrabando.” Does that follow the merenguetón wave and the current trends of the genre?
Let’s see, that song was born before all of this, before the “merenguetón.” Long before. It’s one of the first we wrote. It takes us about two or three years to make a record. I’m a fan of Sandy & Papo and Proyecto Uno. So it was: if we’re going to make a danceable record, if it’s a party, it has to have this.
To promote the release of ¿Dónde Es El After?, you set up a call-in line featuring archival audio of the legendary Venezuelan intellectual Arturo Uslar Pietri discussing the failure of the petro-state model. What was the motivation behind this?
Right now, I’m in the mindset of… there is a dilemma, no? With that idea of the future, the past, and the present. Maybe sometimes, to look forward you have to look backwards. Somehow, the phone number in the matchbox has that surprise, that playfulness. What is coming, or what happened?
It happened with the single “Veneka,” and now it is happening again with this album. On Jan. 3, the country’s situation erupted. Did that alter your plans?
No. With regards to [the release] of “Tonada Por Ella,” it came out on YouTube on Jan. 1st. For me, the logic of the launch was that I’ve always been curious about the social exercise of partying in times of conflict.
Cities like Berlin have an electronic underground scene, and the story of that city is crazy… Or Venezuela itself… This album has a little bit of that conceptually: while we’re celebrating, we also have this pain over us. That is why the release was like this.
What were you thinking when you wrote that song (“Tonada Por Ella”)? A love letter to your country–written in a traditional Venezuelan folk style, it has been embraced as a sonic balm for Venezuelans in recent days.
I wrote that song with Servando [Primera]. We were really sad because of a situation that happened a while ago, and it was a little bit about sharing that — that national pain, nothing else. Just sharing how it feels to lose a country. But for some reason, when we were finishing the song, there was this not-too-sober conversation over a bottle of Cocuy [Venezuelan tequila’ that told us that everything was being reborn.
How do you, as a Venezuelan, maintain composure and prudence? What do you do to stay in a place where you can see it a little bit from the outside and write a song of pain, but also write a party song to your country?
Honestly, I’m disappointed with the previous generation. Everyone got carried away by hate — even people who had so much influence. I understand a “mentada de madre,” [a fuck you’ but when the country is not the priority, then the egos and the thirst for the spotlight take centerstage.
I see businessmen, artists, even the people, everyone is in a dynamic of hate. And then I see them praying. There is a lot of contradiction in that. For me, damn it, the country is always at the front, the people, the social and cultural study.
When I think about it from that perspective, I say, nothing surprises me, because we are also in a very absurd world. Everything that is happening doesn’t make much sense. The only way to surf these situations is, sometimes, as easy as not doing what everyone else is doing. Because everyone has an opinion; everyone thinks they have a right to say something crazy without studying it. Music — any artistic expression — has helped me a lot to communicate that. I’m trying not to talk much right now, because everyone else is already talking.
I imagine that’s why you didn’t give the Latin Grammy acceptance speech for “Veneka” even though it could have been something very personal. And as it turned out, the story is still very personal. [Instead, Venezuelan TV host Erika De La Vega accepted the award.]
[Laughs) Erika [De La Vega] nailed it and she did it by heart.
We’ll see where the after of the after will be…
I ask myself that question as well. I’ve realized that the answer is going to be revealed if you live the present beautifully, with intention. I have a dilemma with the idea that we don’t have to think about the future. I say it from a contradiction and from a genuine ignorance: Is it also okay to live in the present and that’s it? I don’t know.
All my life, I had to think so much about the future for things to happen. My conclusion now is that we must live in the present with intention, but I don’t have the answer. That’s what makes this concept fun for me. The thing is, the album is already surprising us. It’s only been five days since the album came out. That’s where I think the answer is: in intention and being present.
