Rawayana

Sunday night in Valencia and Rawayana clearly had no intention of letting the weekend end quietly. More than 10,000 people packed the Roig Arena for the Venezuelan band's only Valencia date on the ¿Dónde Está el After? World Tour, and for almost three hours the place became a giant, bouncing, singing, slightly psychedelic Caribbean party.

Calling Rawayana's sound trippy pop is usually the easiest way to explain the cocktail of reggae, soul, pop and Caribbean rhythms, but hearing it at this scale makes the description feel almost too neat. Their music is loose, warm and gloriously difficult to keep still to. The crowd understood that immediately.

The opening run of ‘Soltero’, ‘Bienvenidos a la Tierra’ and ‘Dame Un Break’ got the night moving, but the arrival of Beto Montenegro brought the first serious eruption of noise from the floor. From there, Rawayana kept shifting gears without ever losing the thread, moving between laid-back grooves and full-on singalong territory with the confidence of a band completely comfortable in its own skin.

‘Binikini’, their collaboration with Danny Ocean, was one of those moments when 10,000 voices suddenly become part of the arrangement. ‘Feriado’, the Latin Grammy-winning Best Pop Song, landed with equal force, while ‘Hora Loca’pushed the Caribbean influence further into the foreground.

Then Rawayana pulled a particularly smart move: they left the main stage behind and appeared on a second stage in the middle of the arena.

Suddenly the scale changed. The enormous venue became something much more intimate, with ‘Conga’, ‘Bendito’, ‘Coronando’ and ‘Veneka’ turning the centre of the crowd into a giant communal dancefloor. It was a reminder that for all the production and spectacle surrounding a show of this size, Rawayana's greatest weapon remains the songs themselves — music designed to be shared rather than simply watched.

The whole production played into the band's after concept, too. The visuals, movement between stages and constant sense of continuation made the concert feel less like a set with a beginning and an end and more like one long night refusing to call time. By the time they returned to the main stage for ‘Amor de contrabando’, ‘Inglés en Miami’ and ‘Se vienen cositas’, the audience had already been on a three-hour journey and wasn't particularly interested in getting off.

What makes Rawayana's current moment so interesting is the way they have managed to take something deeply rooted in Latin American and Caribbean musical culture and give it a distinctly modern, international identity without sanding away its personality. There is polish here, certainly, but also plenty of looseness, humour and human warmth.

At Roig Arena, that combination proved formidable. 10,000-plus people. Three hours. One giant after. And when Rawayana finally walked off, Valencia still sounded like it was somewhere in the middle of the party.