When Luna Luna first started making music, their approach boiled down to a basic tenet: “Say yes first, figure it out later.” That’s the mentality lead singer Kavvi had when a friend in Dallas offered him the chance to take his music from GarageBand and SoundCloud to a live performance stage. It was 2017, and he knew he needed to start looking for bandmates.
Frequenting the city’s house party circuit, he landed on drummer Kaylin Martínez, who he knew from college, and bassist Ryan Gordon.
The final member to join, Danny Bonilla, had been regularly attending open mics in Dallas’ Deep Ellum district and was mostly unimpressed by the rappers and singer-songwriter types who usually performed.
“But then, out of nowhere, this group comes on, and they look like me,” he said, recalling the night he first saw Luna Luna perform. “That was the first time that happened.” Bonilla was set to take the stage afterward and wanted to make a good impression on the group when he saw they were already headed out the door.
“I was like, ‘Wait! Luna Luna! You’re gonna want to hear this,’” he said, laughing. “It felt so important that they hear me sing because they were the first artists in town that had really impressed me.”
I’ve put together a list of some of my favorite stories published in 2023 by De Los, the Times’ vertical focusing on Latinx culture and identity that I help oversee.
Coincidentally, the group was looking for a fourth member to play keys and sing backup vocals. And while Bonilla wasn’t exactly a keyboardist (he could read music and knew he could pick it up quickly enough), he took a page out of Kavvi’s book and said yes first, planning to figure it out later.
In a scene dominated by DIY punk and rock bands, Luna Luna stood out. With their lo-fi vibes and dreamy bedroom pop sound, they found that their background as a Latinx four-piece set them apart from their peers.
At first, they didn’t sing much in Spanish, but elements of the instrumentation paid homage to their heritage, with Kavvi incorporating guitar and trumpet into the instrumentation. Even his vocals and the romantic lyrics that conjured up images of ‘70s discos and retro high school dances were influenced by Latin American crooners.
To Kavvi, who was born in Colombia and moved to the U.S. at 6 years old, mixing these inspirations came naturally. “It was like blending both worlds,” he said. “Growing up in America, while growing up within a Hispanic household — it’s two very different experiences.”
The band had just started to find their footing in Dallas when the pandemic hit. But rather than drifting into isolation, the lockdown brought them together, helping them lay down the foundation for what would become their album, “Flower Moon,” a debut of shimmery funk-influenced bops and slower, reflective slow jams. During this time, in the summer of 2020, the band’s single, “Commitment,” blew up on TikTok. It wasn’t premeditated.
At the time, Kavvi recalls that he and Bonilla were workshopping a song when he threw up a clip of “Commitment” onto the platform and put his phone back down without another thought. When he came back to it, his screen was flooded with notifications, new followers and comments from listeners excited to stumble upon a bilingual indie act. “Where have you all been my whole life?” One commenter asked. “Y’all are the reason I wanna listen to more Latinx indie music,” read another.
How do Mexican American writers and artists share their traditions with a market that often seems hostile to it? One solution: an iced horchata latte.
Soon after, the group packed their bags and decided to move out of Dallas. At a local bar, they joked over darts that the game would decide their new location: Austin, Los Angeles or Chicago.
In the end, they decided Austin was a good stepping stone. They tried to take things slow, but within less than a year, they landed their first festival gig at Austin City Limits in 2022, making them one of a handful of Latinx artists on the lineup, along with Omar Apollo, The Marías and Sabrina Claudio.
Since then, they’ve continued experimenting with their sound, taking the last year and a half to throw things at the wall and see what works. The fruits of that effort are their latest EP, “L.L.,” featuring more expansive, experimental arrangements, and dance floor-ready tracks such as “La Tormenta” and the hypnotic “Solo Tu.”
“I think we needed that period,” said Kavvi. “Before we were getting labeled as a bedroom pop act because that is where we were making music. But now, it feels like we’ve left the bedroom, and we’re outside, we’re in the club, we’re going to new places.”
A key part of their creative process comes from their live shows. When they first started out in Dallas, they often found that they were the only Latinx act on the bill, with most of their early audiences not really looking like them either.
“As we played more, we saw that our fanbase started looking more like us,” Martínez said. Their shows became a place for community, and over time, they started hearing directly from new fans about how much it meant to see them perform — something that’s been especially meaningful to her.
“Being a queer person, I’m pretty comfortable with my identity, and I think I can take that for granted until I meet people who say that seeing me on stage, being a female drummer, that’s made them feel more comfortable, too,” she said.
To tell the story of the famous Von Erick family, the filmmakers of “The Iron Claw” tapped Guerrero, the scion of another legendary wrestling family.
The group just wrapped up their fourth American tour and they’re riding the high of meeting new fans and seeing others who have been coming to their shows for years. “We’re seasoned veterans now,” joked Gordon. “After every show, we’ll hear that our music has helped people through breakups, or that they met through our music.”
The group capped off the year with the release of “Texas Wild” — a compilation album benefiting Texas Parks & Wildlife Foundation featuring an array of Texas musicians covering iconic songs from the Lone Star State, including Adrian Quesada’s rendition of “Say My Name” by Destiny’s Child and Fat Tony’s cover of “(Hey Baby) Que Paso” with Paul Wall.
For their contribution, Luna Luna chose to take on Selena’s 1994 hit, “Si Una Vez.” “We remade it completely, and did all of the production on our own,” Kavvi said. “We picked it because it still translates today.”
Rather than mimic Selena’s fiery delivery, the group slows their version down, still packing a punch with vocals that lean into the song’s themes of heartbreak and betrayal.
Looking ahead, the band is planning on a big 2024. As they’ve gotten more comfortable as a group, they’re also becoming more themselves, leaning into their roots, and committing to their passion for bilingual music. “I feel like sometimes the music industry makes you choose,” Kavvi said. “You’re either going to be an English artist or a Spanish artist. But so many people grew up with both, and like both. We want to bridge that gap.”
Through their music, the band has come to represent something bigger — they’re the representation of what the music industry could and should look like. That’s what draws in their listeners, and what’s kept them inspired.
“There’s a story that’s told that you’re either one or the other,” Bonilla said. “But we’re here to tell a different story. One about both of those identities existing in the same person. We’re the best people to tell that story because that’s who we are. We represent that part of the Hispanic-American experience — the Texas experience.”
Cat Cardenas is a Latina writer and photographer based in Austin. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, New York Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, GQ and other publications.
The Latinx experience chronicled
Get the Latinx Files newsletter for stories that capture the multitudes within our communities.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
