Karen y Los Remedios Push Cumbia Into the Dark on Bestaria

Karen y Los Remedios formed in Mexico and work from cumbia, but the rhythm is rarely asked to carry the songs alone. Vocalist Ana Karen G. Barajas, producer Jiony (Jonathan Muriel) and guitarist Z.A.M.P.A. (Guillermo Berbeyer) build around it instead, letting a darker atmosphere gather behind the movement. Their music stays animated and lively while something less settled sits underneath, audible most clearly once the sun goes down.

Bestaria, out now via ZZK, gathers twelve songs that each hold that duality. “Ninfa” opens into a soft, gauzy ballad of dreamy synths and shimmering guitar. “Las Moiras” takes the opposite route, pairing a woozy psychedelia with gothic texture. Lead single “Creación del Universo” is the trio at their most immediate, though a wisp of intrigue stays in the mix even there.

The result is an album that treats cumbia as a living vocabulary rather than a fixed reference. Karen y Los Remedios are not reviving a sound or restoring it to some imagined original state. They are using its pulse as a frame for songs that prefer ambiguity: light and shadow sharing the same bar, menace and warmth arriving from the same source. On Bestaria, that balance is the structure, not the decoration.