Los
Marindas
Portrait / los-marindas
Los Marindas are ten players who found each other late. Most had already spent a lifetime in other bands, in courtyards and corner bars around Havana, before they sat down together and decided the songs deserved one proper record.
Ella Baila Lento is that record: an unhurried set of son and bolero that moves like a long evening, from the first tuning of the strings to the city waking up at dawn. There is rum in it, and old balconies, and the particular ache of a dance that ends too soon. Nothing here is in a rush, because none of them are anymore.
Nylon guitars, soft percussion and Spanish vocals in the warm Buena Vista lineage, the kind of playing that only comes from decades of doing it. It settles easily into Latin, lounge and dinner listening, and lends an instant sense of place to film and travel.
A Los Marindas project by Lars Curfs.
This one goes back to my grandparents' living room. Every time we visited, the Gipsy Kings were coming out of the speakers, always Bamboleo, always loud. That is where it started for me. Latin music has been my favourite ever since, because you can hear the passion in it in a way I have never quite found anywhere else.
It kept finding me. In my teens my mother played her Buena Vista Social Club CDs until they were worn out. Through the 2010s, Spanish started turning up everywhere on the radio: Enrique Iglesias as a full-blown pop star singing in Spanish, rappers like Pitbull, and more recently Bad Bunny. Then in 2020, stuck indoors like everyone else, I started actually learning the language. I still practise, and these days I can follow most of what I am listening to.
Releasing a Spanish-language album was one of my goals for 2026, and Ella Baila Lento is what came out of it: the Gipsy Kings sound I grew up on, blended with the Buena Vista warmth my mother played, with a little of the modern rap phrasing that pulled Spanish back onto the radio. I built the group with one younger player in the line-up on purpose, someone with his own solo career running alongside it. That is Par Rasol.