Santiago Rojas, who raps as El Kalvo, didn’t come up in Colombia’s hip-hop scene through the streets. He came through a record player. Growing up in Suba, in the northern outskirts of Bogota, he would spend hours at his father’s house carefully pulling vinyl sleeves from their covers: Queen, Joe Arroyo. He studied the liner notes, pressing play. The ritual repeated at his aunt’s place in Tunja, where a copy of the Fugees’ Score sat in the collection, a record whose cover bridged two worlds he hadn’t yet learned to name. “I did it like an eight-year-old kid,” he recalls. “More for the ritual of the record than anything else.” When rap in Spanish finally arrived in his life, he had been preparing for years.
That eye for detail would become the backbone of his work. “My Bogotá is a bus window,” he shares, referencing the long ride from Suba to the city center, a commute that cuts across almost every neighborhood and social stratum the capital has to offer. That vantage point shaped a lyrical instinct for creativity. In his lyrical universe, an empanada carries more weight than just an empanada; it becomes a sort of love language, like in “Severenda Muchacha,” where he declares, “Eres el ají de mi empanada.”
He started writing rhymes as a young man, long before his voice changed. By 2004, he was performing at Muestras para No Delinquir, a landmark festival for Bogotá’s underground hip-hop scene, as part of a crew called Real Súper Fan. Colombia’s political turbulence was never far from his pen: one of his first complete statements as El Kalvo was a 2012 song in response to the attempt to remove Bogotá’s then-mayor Gustavo Petro from office, a moment that crystallized what his rap was going to be about. Not beefs, not ego trips, but the city, its people, and the forces that shape their daily lives. His debut solo album finally came out in 2015.
Since then, he has built a body of work that treats LPs as objects with their own universe: 2022’s Algarabías came with an art book illustrated by Colombian artists, and 2024’s Los tres golpes extended the music into a full merchandise experience. In Colombian slang, “los tres golpes” are the three daily meals: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Every track on the record orbits Colombian gastronomy, Catholic imagery, and the textures of everyday life that nobody else in the scene bothers to document—the mechanic’s shop calendar with the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the empanada cart on the corner, the long commute home. “Serving food, cooking, sharing food with the people I love and the people I’m grateful for—that’s fundamental to me,” he shares. For El Kalvo, Colombia is not a backdrop. It’s the raw material.
His upcoming new album Resabiado, due in August, is where all of that trajectory lands. The 14-song album includes unreleased tracks such as “Mi ñero lo sabe” with Rap Bang Club’s Pezkatore, and band-style reworkings of essential cuts from the last decade like “Repetir hasta coronar,” “Severenda Muchacha,” and “Elías,” a heartfelt tribute to his grandfather. The record traces its origins to his Estéreo Picnic Festival performance in 2024, where El Kalvo first brought a full band to a major stage. “We needed to break the fucking ceiling. We had to present something nobody had presented in the Colombian hip-hop scene,” he explains. Though the show landed well artistically, it was a financial disaster, and the format never generated the touring circuit anticipated. “That awesome music we put together didn’t exist anywhere else. So, if we didn’t record that established format, no one would want to buy it later,” explains El Kalvo.
The result is an album where boom bap mutates into merengue: “Repetir hasta coronar” gets there with the help of Wilson Triana from Proyecto Uno, who brings the tambora dominicana and güira. It’s also where the raw material is always Colombian. The music video for that same track was filmed at a roasted chicken restaurant in Bogotá. “The reason I made new versions of those songs was that I felt I could improve them. That musically speaking, they could go beyond their original form. The good thing is that we’ve already had three years and about 20 shows to test how people react,” he adds.
For this upcoming project, El Kalvo proposed something simple: for approximately $50—roughly a tenth of the Colombian minimum wage—fans could own one percent of the streaming royalties from whichever track they chose. More than 130 people said yes within a week, enough to fund three days of studio time at Panorámica Soundworks with producer Sebastián Gama and pay every musician a dignified wage. That kind of trust doesn’t come cheap or fast. “I know there are a lot of artists who struggle to get funding, and it’s not easy for people to trust you enough to do something like this,” he reflects. “That’s been 20 years of building that trust.”
Resabiado is not as much of a record for hardcore hip-hop fans, but for those who gravitate more toward indie-oriented sound scenes. “We don’t worry about pleasing rappers. I mean, it’s all good—obviously they’re going to like it. They’ll probably go wild for it. But I’m not going to stop doing what I want to do—making the song I like to dance to and enjoy or putting whatever track I want to a different beat—just because a purist isn’t going to like it,” he concludes.
For an MC who has spent 20 years turning bus windows and empanadas into poetry, Resabiado is the logical conclusion: a record that sounds like Colombia, funded by the people who live in it. Come on in, we’ve got roasted chicken in the back.