Music

On an overcast winter afternoon in McAllen, Texas, all six members of Grupo Frontera are huddled around an oversize white box, staring gleefully at its contents. They peel back the tissue paper wrapping to reveal a present their stylist has gifted them just a few days shy of Christmas — a mound of plush Polo Ralph Lauren bathrobes, one for each member, with a brassy statement stitched onto the back: “B–ch, I got a Grammy!”
The members of the norteño and cumbia band — which won the Latin Grammy for best norteño album in 2024 — are standing inside their palatial Frontera HQ in McAllen, a home that they purchased last year. Built in the mid-2000s, the sprawling estate is a very particular vision of turn-of-the-21st-century luxury (see: the Tuscan kitchen replete with dark wood cabinetry). A minimalist home recording studio, where the band has laid down several tracks, sits just past the outdoor path wending around the pool and hot tub, in a yard expansive enough to park their fleet of tour buses.

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Privacy and practicality alike spurred the band to centralize its operations here. When its star began rising about three years ago, after its cover of Colombian pop-rockers Morat’s “No Se Va” surged to life-altering virality on TikTok, Grupo Frontera would frequently record music in this South Texas enclave of the Rio Grande Valley where its members grew up and still reside — until some locals figured out where the group was recording and started showing up to the studio unannounced. “People would deadass just open the door, walk in and listen to whatever we were recording,” says frontman Adelaido “Payo” Solís in between sips of a briny michelada. “They would just wait for us to finish. Then we came out, we saw people, and we were like, ‘Hi?’ ”

Grupo Frontera will perform at Billboard Presents THE STAGE at SXSW at Moody Ampitheater at Waterloo Park in Austin on March 14. Get your tickets here.

Crucially, the house is decidedly “party-ful,” as Julian Peña Jr., the band’s affable percussionist and hype man, puts it. Grupo Frontera has held a tequila-fueled carne asada (a barbecue hang) or two here, including a baby shower for accordionist Juan Javier Cantú, who recently welcomed a daughter with his wife. The group — which also includes drummer Carlos Guerrero, bassist Brian Ortega and guitarist/bajo quinto player Beto Acosta — hopes to eventually open up the space for visiting collaborators and friends to crash there. But given that the house is still barely furnished, those plans are on hold for the moment. There aren’t many places to sit, save for a few folding chairs and tables here and there; only a handful of the home’s six bedrooms have mattresses in them propped up against walls. Tellingly, the sole piece of art inside is a framed photograph of the band mugging with superstar Bad Bunny — who collaborated with Grupo Frontera on its Billboard Hot 100 smash “un x100to,” peaking at No. 5 on the chart — splattered with globs of bright paint.

Interior decorating was admittedly low on the band’s priority list in 2024 — a year in which Grupo Frontera released its punchy set Jugando a Que No Pasa Nada, which reached the top 10 of the Top Latin Albums chart. An ambitious tour around the United States, Mexico and one date in Spain followed at amphitheaters and arenas, with shows featuring pyrotechnic flourishes and stretching about two hours. Somehow, Grupo Frontera also found time to release Mala Mía, a joint EP with fellow música mexicana stalwarts and collaborators Fuerza Regida, before the year ended. Then in late November, the group won its first-ever Latin Grammy for its 2023 debut album, El Comienzo.

Brian Ortega

Jasmine Archie

In the three brief years it has been together, Grupo Frontera has transformed from a cohort playing covers at quinceañeras into a Mexican American boy band commanding some of the world’s largest stages — where it’s sometimes accompanied by legends its members looked up to while growing up, like Ramón Ayala, and other huge stars it has now recorded with, like Peso Pluma, Maluma and Nicki Nicole. By melding the norteño and cumbia of their childhoods with their micro-generation’s penchant for embracing genre swerves (most of the band members are young millennials, save for Solís, who’s about to turn 22), Grupo Frontera has helped usher in a new era of música mexicana.

“I feel that they’ve created a powerful movement and opened the path for more bands and for the public to reconnect with a genre that had been under the radar several years,” says Edgar Barrera, the Grammy- and Latin Grammy-winning songwriter who has written dozens of songs for the group and has been a mentor to it. Given that seven of the band’s singles and both of its studio albums have reached the top 10 on the Hot Latin Songs and Top Latin Albums charts, respectively, the approach seems to be working.

Grupo Frontera’s success story is all the more astonishing considering the unorthodox decisions its members have made along the way. For one thing, they have no interest in moving from the relatively quiet McAllen (population: roughly 150,000) to a Latin music metropolis like Miami or Los Angeles to be closer to potential opportunities. “We really take it to heart when they say, ‘Keep your feet on the ground,’ ” Guerrero says. “Us being humble is what’s going to take us farther.”

Adelaido “Payo” Solís

Jasmine Archie

Julian Peña Jr.

Jasmine Archie

Instead, they’re bullish about staying close to home in the valley, a region that has made national headlines recently as one of the areas the Trump administration has targeted for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. The Rio Grande Valley is also home to Intocable, one of the most successful norteño bands ever, and the region has historically produced talented musicians and even a handful of breakthrough stars — Bobby Pulido, Duelo and Freddy Fender among them — in spite of lacking the infrastructure that helps groups take the next big step.

In another unlikely turn, the band has released its music independently; indie label VHR Music put out its debut album, and the band self-released Jugando. But don’t mistake these decisions for ambivalence — the group is wary of staying in the same place, metaphorically speaking. “It’s not OK for you to be too comfortable and feel like what you’re doing right now is going to work out forever,” Solís says. And now Grupo Frontera finds itself at a new crossroads as it strategizes how to reach the next level of stardom — specifically, expanding its audience beyond the United States and Mexico, bringing its heart-tugging cumbias to new ears.

“We want to go someday to Japan,” Cantú says. “Any place we could play that’s different. Brazil is a goal we have … We want to put out our Mexican roots to the whole world.”

Grupo Frontera’s origin story is bound up in TikTok’s inscrutable algorithm. In early 2022, one of its first singles, the ebullient “No Se Va,” became ubiquitous on the platform, debuting at No. 50 on Hot Latin Songs and eventually climbing to the top 10. The guys had just started playing music together during off-hours from their day jobs as car dealership finance managers and ranchers. They cobbled together early videos for a few hundred dollars and learned about the music industry by searching “how to” tutorials on YouTube. When the TikTok spotlight suddenly shone on them, they seized the moment. The act soon started working with Barrera, and in mere months, it had released another hit, then another. “If it wasn’t for TikTok when we released ‘No Se Va,’ it probably would have stayed in our hometown of the valley,” Solís says.

Barrera — who has written and produced for megastars including Shakira and Maluma — has a distinctive sensibility that has no doubt helped Grupo Frontera’s sound evolve over the years. His guidance was a boon in those early days, and he especially helped the act see a bigger picture. “We were thinking about, ‘How do we do the biggest wedding here in the valley?’ And [Barrera] goes, ‘Wedding? How can you do the biggest stadiums in the whole world? That’s how you have to think,’ ” Peña remembers. “And we’re like, ‘All right, let’s think that way.’ And then little by little, when we would release a song, we would do it thinking that this song was going to go viral, this song was going to help us out. And it would work.”

From left: Beto Acosta, Julian Peña Jr., Juan Javier Cantú, Carlos Guerrero, Brian Ortega, and Adelaido “Payo” Solís of Grupo Frontera photographed December 20, 2024 in McAllen, Texas.

Jasmine Archie

It’s been practically three years to the day since Grupo Frontera first went nuclear on TikTok, back when talk of an outright ban wasn’t imminent. Yet some of the band members deleted their personal TikTok accounts recently and haven’t redownloaded the app since it returned online in mid-January following a brief ban. (The band’s professional TikTok is still active.) They don’t exactly miss it, personally. “I feel like I’m a new man,” Cantú says with a smile. These days, Solís has focused the attention he would have spent scrolling through TikTok on Splice, an app for sampling and creating songs. While Solís doesn’t consider himself a gloomy person, he admittedly gravitates toward “melancholy, sad, depressing chords” while writing. “That’s what inspires me, to be honest: those sadder chords.”

While Solís’ voice is his main instrument, he occasionally plays guitar, piano and accordion by ear. He’d like to get better at nailing down exactly what he wants to hear from the instrument he’s playing so those sounds can aid him with songwriting — something he has been doing more of since last year’s Jugando (where he was credited with co-writing the song “Ibiza,” which is about wanting to give a lover anything their heart desires).

Though Barrera has written most of Grupo Frontera’s songs so far, along with other writers like Ríos, the band feared becoming complacent by always yielding those creative duties to someone else. “We were comfortable with the fact that [Barrera] would send us a song and that’s it,” Solís says. “But at a certain point, we felt like we weren’t working for it.” The group started inviting other songwriters into the mix, and Solís began chipping in more after a generative writing camp with Barrera.

The band sees taking calculated sonic risks as pivotal to its next phase. In late January, for instance, Grupo Frontera hopped on a song with Spanish icon Alejandro Sanz, “Hoy no me siento bien,” that marked two milestones: It was the group’s first-ever salsa tune and its farthest-afield collaborator to date. “I’m not too sure if a bajo quinto has ever played salsa before, but Beto was trying his best,” Solís jokes. Unlike the band’s usual fare, the song doesn’t address being in (or out of) love, either. “But I love the message,” Solís says. “It’s like, ‘Today, I don’t feel OK and that’s OK.’ ”

“Yeah, like feeling bad is OK, too,” Cantú interjects. “That’s badass.”

Juan Javier Cantú

Jasmine Archie

Carlos Guerrero

Jasmine Archie

On its recent collaborative EP with Fuerza Regida, Grupo Frontera moved in yet another direction: trying corridos imbued with a Tejano bent, along with its cumbias. While these projects have been well-received commercial successes, the prospect of potentially not hitting the mark, and perhaps even failing, doesn’t seem to deter the act. “That’s what we want to do — to tell the world that Frontera can collaborate with different artists and that we could also make different styles of music,” Cantú says. “That’s our goal, most likely, for this year. Not to get away from cumbia or norteño — that’s our base. But also like, ‘Hey, we could also play and sing this.’ ”

The morning after catching a transatlantic flight from Spain, the members of Grupo Frontera arrive at a local sports club in McAllen with rackets in tow. They’re here to play padel, a sport resembling tennis and squash, that they got hooked on thanks to its low chance of injury. As they arrive one by one, the guys seem in good spirits if a bit bleary-eyed. They begin warming up by bouncing balls against glass walls surrounding the court. Acosta arrives last, strolling in with a sheepish grin. “The tardy one,” the band’s publicist says with an eye roll. “You can put that in the article.”

Since only four players can be on the court at any given time, the men rotate sets. Acosta rolls up one pant leg to get his head in the game, then forcefully serves the yellow ball. It lands with a thwack on the court’s blue turf, and Cantú bursts out singing the keyboard riff from “The Final Countdown.” S–t-talking abounds. Guerrero, who suffered an injury after missing the last step of some stairs, is moving with some hesitation — but after playing a few focused rounds, he and Acosta win the impromptu tournament.

While they might be opponents on the court at this moment, they tend to operate as a single organism in the band’s day-to-day decision-making. They use a democratic process and any arguments are cleared up directly: “When one person is wrong, the rest of the group notices it and they just tell them straight up,” Solís says.

Solís sees a through line between the band’s padel habit and the heightened energy it unleashed on last year’s Live Nation-promoted Jugando tour. In 2023, when it first started touring extensively, Solís admits that he would tend to stay in the same spot while singing onstage. “Then this year, I would, like, run around and jump across the stage and stuff.” The guys start chortling, talking over one another as they consider how they might elevate their stage presence in 2025: “Backflips! Shirtless concerts! Splits!”

Should the band realize its stadium dreams, the group’s penchant for showmanship will likely still need to be amped up further. “The show needs an upgrade on the technical and musical sides,” explains Raymond Acosta, the director of talent management at Habibi who works with the band there. (The band has been signed to the management division of Rimas Entertainment since 2023.) “The larger space demands a greater offering to fans. It has to be a unique experience where fans feel part of something bigger than just a show. It’s a challenge to connect with every single person in that stadium.” But as Acosta sees it, a band like Grupo Frontera is up for that challenge: The act “can attract all types of crowds, which makes a significant difference.”

Beto Acosta

Jasmine Archie

For the moment, Grupo Frontera is embarking on something else it has never done before: taking a monthlong break to recalibrate from its breakneck touring schedule, right before delving into writing new music. The last item on its calendar in December involves distributing free holiday toys for a block party at Edinburg, Texas’ Bert Ogden Arena, where it held a spur-of-the-moment free performance for the community.

Grupo Frontera is cognizant of how it represents the Rio Grande Valley both out on the road and at home. And while it has always eschewed any talk of politics, it has inherently become part of any discussion of where the band comes from, as the U.S.-Mexico border is now a flash point for discussions about immigration, xenophobia and racism. When I ask in December if they’ve been feeling the reverberations of this particular political moment — with the vocally anti-immigrant Trump administration then about to enter the White House — and if their fans approach them wanting to talk about politics, the band deflects. “I mean, our group name, Grupo Frontera, I think it feels natural for people to be like, ‘You’re from the border,’ stuff like that,” Guerrero says. “We always try to keep that private.” Peña chimes in, saying that they strive to “talk about music, that’s it.” (Their publicist shuts down any further discussion of the topic.)

But recently, the band had to answer for a political controversy of its own, when a video of Solís’ grandmother (known as “La Abuela Frontera” online) dancing to “Y.M.C.A.,” a song that Trump played frequently on the campaign trail, circulated online. Coupled with a now-deleted TikTok video of the band jamming to the same song, it prompted outrage from fans who perceived it as the group celebrating Trump’s election win. The backlash has since led to boycotts and a petition calling for Grupo Frontera to be taken off the lineup for Sueños, a Chicago musical festival where it’s slated to perform in May.

In response, the band wrote in a statement that “Grupo Frontera has NO affiliation nor alliance with any political party that’s against immigrants and the Latino community. Like many of you, our families and [group] members have fought and struggled for a better future, and we will always take our people’s side, defending our roots and values. It’s important you know that the opinions of our friends and family don’t represent Grupo Frontera. We are immigrants, we are from the border, and Grupo Frontera will always be by and for the people.” The band also posted a video in late February stating that the “Y.M.C.A.” video had been part of a routine it had on its last tour, where it danced to a different song before each show; in it, Acosta lamented how a swirl of “fake news” had been “putting us against our own people.”

As they see it, their main obligation is to elevate the valley in the eyes of the world, especially the musicians who hail from their same stomping grounds. “There’s a lot of talent,” Guerrero says of musicians in the valley. “Better than us,” Acosta adds. To them, what prevents musicians from making a successful living in music here is a lack of recording studios — but they want to leave behind a “trail for everybody to do it,” Cantú says. That might eventually involve having bands record at their own studio. As the guys see it, it’s not so much that they “made it” out of the valley, but rather that they’re “trying to make the valley grow,” as Solís puts it.

It was that same kind of support that first convinced Grupo Frontera to stay independent, after hearing cautionary tales from Acosta’s brother and other local musicians who had signed unfavorable record deals. Since then, it has made as much of an effort to learn the back end of the music business as it does fine-tuning chord progressions, often seeking Barrera’s counsel. Even after it was first approached by a few big labels, the band had “a gut feeling that it was not the right choice at the time,” Cantú says, a smile growing across his face. “And it worked out pretty good.”

The members believe these incremental steps, along with their unconventional approach, will take them where they eventually plan to be. “We’re trying to become superstars,” Peña says. “Something that 30 years from now, somebody’s going to look back [and say], ‘Dude, you remember Frontera?’ ”

A while back, Peña recalls, someone in Grupo Frontera (he doesn’t remember who) mentioned wanting to become like AC/DC or Queen — a timeless band steeped in mythos. At first, Peña scoffed at the idea. “I remember saying, ‘Dude, shut up. Like, what the hell?’ ” he says. “And now I think about it like, ‘Why not?’ I mean, why can’t we be that?”

This story appears in the March 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.