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 before his voice had broken, and by 2004, he was performing at Muestras para No Delinquir, a local festival in downtown Bogotá, as part of a crew called Real Súper Fan. The solo project came later via a 2012 song responding to the attempt to remove Bogotá’s then-mayor Gustavo Petro from office. It was one of his first complete statements as El Kalvo, and his debut solo album followed in 2015. Since then, he has built a body of work defined as much by its packaging and presentation as its music. Algarabías from 2022 came with an art book illustrated by Colombian artists, and 2024’s Los tres golpes included a board game, a fanny pack, and a collection of stickers. The latter’s title says it all: in Colombian slang, “los tres golpes” are the three daily meals—breakfast, lunch, and dinner—so every track refers to Colombian gastronomy one way or the other. Food runs through all of it, not as a theme but as language. “Serving food, cooking, sharing food with the people I love and the people I’m grateful to; that’s fundamental to me,” he says.
Resabiado (June 19) is where all of that trajectory lands. It’s a 14-song album that includes unreleased tracks and band-style reworkings of essential cuts from the last decade, among them “Repetir hasta coronar,” “Severenda Muchacha,” and “Elías.” The record traces its origins to the Estéreo Picnic Festival in 2024, where El Kalvo first brought the band format 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. The show landed well artistically, but financially, it was a disaster, and the format never generated the touring circuit El Kalvo had 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 because that’s not what you hear when you click on my music on YouTube or Spotify,” explains El Kalvo regarding the decision to musically elevate the songs. For instance, in Resabiado, the boom bap-oriented “Repetir hasta coronar” is reworked as a merengue with the aid of Wilson Triana from Proyecto Uno, who plays the tambora dominicana and güira. But some things remained on brand: the music video for “Repetir hasta coronar,” the only single released before the album, was filmed at a popular roasted chicken restaurant in Bogota. For El Kalvo’s music, every bit of Colombian idiosyncrasy is worth celebrating.
For an artist who has moved between alternative music and the edgier side of local hip-hop, the project made sense: “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 to these versions,” he says.
The decision to form a band for the record and some shows stems from a series of improvisational exercises that El Kalvo undertook nearly a decade ago when, at Matik Matik—a legendary venue in the city for experimental music in Bogota—he began jamming with jazz musicians such as Kike Mendoza, Urián Sarmiento, and Juan David Castaño, from key acts in neo jazz Colombian bands such as Chirrimía Balsámica, Los Toscos, El ombligo, or Mula. “I was always more into the graphic, the visual side of things. I didn’t study music; I never had any formal training, and suddenly I found myself interacting with these masters, and that blew my mind. It filled me with structures, ideas, rhythms, and music. It broke down a lot of my mental barriers,” he explains, referring to a series of processes that lingered in his subconscious until the completion of Resabiado, a way of thinking hip-hop outside the sonic limits of the genre. After all, these musicians were playing way past the 4/4 standard, like saying, “Let’s see what this fucker is all about,” as El Kalvo recalls.
For this 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 the hardcore hip-hop fans, but for those who circle more 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.
Resabiado is a victory for a rapper who does not revel in his vanity, but wants to let everyone inside his party. Come on in: we’ve got roasted chicken at the back.
Resabiado is out now.