If you’ve been to the club recently, you’ve heard it at least once. Deconstructed reggaeton drums, baile funk vocal shots, guaracha flaring horns, raptor house frantic kicks, dembow sped-up percussions. These sounds are ubiquitous in today’s electronic music landscape, and one umbrella category melds them all together: Latin club. Encompassing big cities like São Paulo and Bogotá and diaspora hubs like Miami, New York and London, this term draws from music genres that have always been the club music in Latin America – and only now, under new iterations, have gained the attention of the Global North.

The Latin club idea evokes a fragmented, rich and diverse soundscape. Centuries of domination, violence and population displacement have fundamentally shaped not only the region’s name, but its music – an element that runs like blood through the open veins of Latin America, paraphrasing renowned writer Eduardo Galeano. In the club, this translates to artists navigating aesthetic choices as complex as power structures: from language barriers to racial prejudice to the region’s widespread income inequality and historical repression of dissident cultural manifestations. It’s an intricate scenario that presents a range of contrasting possibilities.

There’s no denying how the Latin club wave has, in the past few years, facilitated meaningful connections in the region. Artists from Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, among others, now collaborate and support each other’s work through labels and party collectives like Mamba Negra, ALGOL, Putivuelta, Hiedra and Ritmica Paraiso, to name a few. The term also pushes back against a narrow canonisation of so-called legitimate club music: from remixing the latest Bad Bunny to obscure edits of cumbia, there’s a wide sonic catalogue on the table. For artists breaking into international circuits, Latin club has ultimately provided an entry point and shared identity that consolidates business and negotiations with festivals, venues and agencies.

However, the category is also reductive. Latin club fails to embrace the full diversity of electronic music across places as different as Rio, Caracas and Santiago – it’s like quicksand that appears solid from a distance but liquefies under pressure. The term can flatten the multitude of Latin American club-oriented sounds into one tag, erasing distinctions and local contexts, ethnicities and identities. And, while it provides a place for some artists in the European festival and big venue circuit, it also enables tokenism: once the big venue or the major summer festival fills up the Latin slot, the job is done.

In the face of so many limitations, the question looms: what now? Last month, I stopped by Bogotá Music Market, a conference-slash-festival that brought together, for a couple of days, some of the most compelling electronic music acts in Latin America. Between one DJ set and another, we asked artists about the past and present of Latin club. Among different opinions, one thing is for sure: from the northern tip of Mexico to the southern ice barrier of Argentina, from the coastline of Peru to the easternmost point of Brazil, and all over the Caribbean, the electronic music from Latin America is here to stay.

2AT

Hailing from Bogota’s punk scene, 2AT is one of the masterminds behind Muakk. Founded in 2022, the label and collective has built an impressive catalogue of hard, fast-paced drums from across Latin America. From Mexican producer Nick DGO’s tribaltek-laced jams to Aleroj's hi-nrg guaracha, Muakk has become known as a maelstrom of Latin club tools. Some of the most cutting-edge of them are signed by 2AT himself.

“I believe we’ll branch out ‘Latin club’ to a wide range of genres,” he says. “We come from an era where techno and rave inspired freedom, but I see projects now exploring the counterpart – ambient and musical experiences outside the club. We’ll see more links with visual arts, less focused on weekends, slower tempo and calmer music – everything is cyclical.”

BABATR

He’s a staple of electronic music far beyond Latin America’s borders. As one of the creators of Raptor House – the feverish Venezuelan dancefloor phenomenon – Babatr spent years as a Caracas secret gem. He played parties and clubs in his hometown, certain his music could reach more ears and move more bodies. Those days have finally arrived. In recent years, clubs and festivals worldwide have discovered Babatr’s genre-busting, powerful sets and productions, a music-making that conveys the energy of Latin America with an indispensable goal – to make the dancefloor move.

“We’re still opening spaces for us: people like me, Wost, Badsista, we can’t move a mountain by ourselves, and we need to support different genres and styles,” he says. ”One day I’ll stop playing, I will have my days off. So we need to collab, make new connections. Today, they know we exist, we exist for them – Europe and the US. But how many years have passed without us existing? The struggle is just beginning.”

DJEIZZA

Against all odds and the menace parents usually sense from electronic music, Djeizza got her first support to be a DJ from her dad: “He’s a musician,” she says. “So when I was 15 years old, he asked me: ‘Don’t you want a DJ controller?’” Djeizza declined at first, but her dad was right. A couple of years later, she began playing parties in her hometown in the south of Brazil and eventually moved to São Paulo to pursue a music career. Now an up-and-coming name in São Paulo, she’s known for sets that blend baile funk percussion with hardgroove and Latin-fueled techno.

“I’m afraid this is a roller coaster, and eventually we’ll hit a low after being in the spotlight,” she says. “But I hope we keep on bringing the Brazilian flavour to the scene, the Brazilian sounds we want to show to the world. I also believe we have a sense of unity in Latin America; I mean, my achievement of playing abroad for the first time in my career is also a collective achievement”

NICO PARGA

One of the new wave of guaracha's most popular acts, Nico Parga commands both the dancefloor and the studio like few of his generation. Tracks like “Multiverso Brasileiro” showcase his skill at blending aleteo’s blaring horns with the bouncy kicks of Dutch-through-Latin American house (also known as noia dance in Brazil), a talent he doesn’t spare while DJing, whether in small rooms or packed big venues.

“I have always tried to show that I am Latino. That is, wherever I go, I show the flavour of Latin America, and I try to show that in every track I produce, whether it’s guaracha, whether it’s tech house, or whether it’s afro. We have lots of good producers here today, but there’s also lots of criticism towards our music,’ he says. “I see afrolatin is now on the rise, tech-house too, Dutch. I believe we’re still on the verge of something big.”

WOST

If Latin club has a defining act, it’s Wost. Born in Venezuela and based in Colombia, the DJ and producer has become a go-to name for those in search of elating sounds with ever-precise and off-kilter drumworks. His productions run a wide gamut of Latin sounds with a knack for intensive percussion and infectious build-ups. One career-making move: handing a USB stick of his productions to Verraco, head of Tratratrax, back when Wost was just a SoundCloud name – the kind of go-getter verve that separates good producers from great artists.

“We all know how reductive ‘Latin club’ can be, but I can’t deny it helped me, so we need to use it responsibly: I released a sample pack titled ‘Latin Club Edits’, but I made sure to add a manifest to the zip, a text file explaining that ‘Latin club’ is an umbrella category,” he says. “I believe we experienced a boom around 2022 and now it’s a bit low tide. If we want to avoid becoming a fad, we must work as a community, supporting ourselves with our own codes.”