What is the sound of cumbia today?

The right answer, of course, is that there is no single sound. But Frente Cumbiero’s bandleader Mario Galeano has a lot of answers to that question. Since their 2010 debut of the trippy, synth-dense Pitchito, the world has looked to Bogota-based Frente for the most swinging, forward-thinking cumbia and tropical music.

Galeano is maybe best known for his 2012 collaboration with Will Holland AKA Quantic, when the two were tasked by the British Council to create a band to represent Colombia in the London Olympics. The band was called Ondatropica, and its members included Michi Sarmiento, Abelardo Carbono, and the Afro-Pacifico legend Nidia Gongora. (!!!)

Seasoned with years of touring with Quantic, as well as his other band Los Pirañas (with Eblis Alvarez of the Meridian Brothers), Mario came back to Bogota and reformed Frente as a quartet with a stripped-down powerhouse sound — a raw Colombian stew of synths, horns, and percussion. Trad genres like cumbia, vallenato, porro, caracolito, and gaita are blended with funk, electronica, and jazz. It shouldn’t work. But it does.

It’s tropicanibalismo — the tropical Colombian sound of the coast filtered through the country’s chillier, higher-altitude metropolis of Bogota. It’s creative dance music. It’s the past, present and future of cumbia.