Cuco Shares New Music “Cucombia”

You already know these songs. You’ve heard “Llorar” blasting through a sound system on Saturday night and in the kitchen on a Sunday morning, while someone cleaned. You’ve danced to “La Negra Tomasa” at a wedding where three generations shared the same floor. These aren’t songs you discover. They’re songs that soundtrack our lives.

Mexican-American artist Cuco has released Cucombia, a two-song release featuring his reinterpretations of these two pillars of Cumbia music. The project doesn’t reimagine them. It honors how they already live, at sonideros, quinceañeras, and every gathering where the music gets turned up and the room comes alive.

“Llorar” and “La Negra Tomasa” are songs Cuco absorbed before he ever chose to be a musician, part of the soundtrack that shaped him long before the studio did. Cucombia places him within a lineage he didn’t have to seek out because it was already in the room.

Throughout Cuco’s U.S. Ridin’ Tour, both tracks have become the night’s defining moments, entire rooms singing every word, crowds moving together without prompting.

Not because the songs are new to them, but because the songs never left. Cucombia carries these songs forward, not as nostalgia, but as living music that continues to move through new generations and shared spaces. It’s an affirmation of where Cuco comes from and the culture that continues to shape everything he makes.