T o Manolo Cabrera and Hugo Lara, the guys who make up the duo RØZ, 2025 was almost too huge a year to fully put into words. It was the kind of wild breakthrough most artists dream of when they’re starting off: Gigantic festival sets, a headlining show that sold out in minutes, songs that went massively viral. They’re still in awe months later, recounting it all over Zoom. “It’s been shocking to see how much all of this has connected with people,” Lara says. “The reaction, the shows — it’s just been completely crazy.”

Perhaps more unexpected is that RØZ has achieved all of this not by doing typical pop genres — but by creating a new avenue for themselves with electrifying house and EDM sounds. Their chromatic dancefloor explosions haven’t just taken over clubs and festivals; they’ve landed some serious chart-toppers, like their breakout “Apaga La Luz” with Peso Pluma, which made it onto the top 100 on Mexico’s streaming charts. They’ve become artist’s artists, too. Other Mexican acts, like musica mexicana heartthrob DannyLux and production wunderkind NSQK, have all been eager to jump on recent collabs with the guys, spinning off major songs.

Of course, neither of them totally guessed this is where they’d be today. Lara’s path in music started a much more traditional way — through classical music. “I always wanted to be like Vivaldi because my mother used to play him, so I started playing the violin afterschool. That was my first actual interaction with music.” Eventually, as he got older, he started making more ambitious compositions, inspired by movie soundtracks that saw him mixing his violinist and synths.

Cabrera, meanwhile, was interested in electronic music from the start. He had seen one of the official “aftermovies” for the EDM festival Tomorrowland and was instantly intrigued. “I was like, ‘Damn, you can just make music in your house.’ And I started looking into becoming a DJ and then I started producing,” he says. Pretty soon, he was smashing together beats in his neighborhood in Mexico City, though back then he leaned more toward R&B and hip-hop styles.

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Lara and Cabrera were always in each other’s orbit. Cabrera was a high school classmate of Lara’s younger sister, and they were aware that the other was into music. However, they grew closer during that he pandemic and began following their sonic efforts more carefully. Lara remembers hearing Cabrera for the first time: “It was some experimental tropical house, like Kygo mixed with R&B, but it was cool. It just sounded different and we started this seamless connection,” Lara says.

Cabrera was blown away by Lara’s own style and ability to blend organic sounds into his projects. “I just found it very weird and crazy that someone was releasing movie soundtrack music. He used to release these synth songs that were super progressive and they shocked me. I knew about the analog world, but I really didn’t know how to physically do it. And then I met him and, and he was just, like, doing that in his bedroom.”

But the real magic came when they worked on their first few tracks. “When we mixed his weird stuff with my weird stuff, it just sounded like something I wasn’t hearing before,” Lata says. “Manolo wanted to be la Marshmello and I wanted to like Hans Zimmer, so when you take those two things, it’s just totally unexpected.”

That’s been what’s attracted other people to their sound. The guys started making waves with songs like “Cora de Hielo,” a track that stood out for its unpredictable rhythms. “When we started doing weird shit and it started working, it was like with ‘Cora de Hielo,’ which is one of our biggest songs right now,” Cabrera says. “That’s when we stopped giving a shit about what people wanted to hear or what something has to sound like or song structures. Like, that song has about four drops. It’s weird, but people liked it.”

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Their left-of-center thinking soon attracted Mexican star Peso Pluma, who stopped by the studio to check out what Cabrera and Lara had going on. The guys don’t typically work with demo packs, but they had a couple things they wanted to show him. “We’re going through all these cool beats we made and we’re like, ‘Oh he’s gonna fucking love this one and this one.’ And we were just playing those and he was like, ‘…Do you guys have more?’” They thought of one working track they had that they’d playfully named ‘Shrek.’ “We were like, ‘We have to play him ‘Shrek?’ It never crossed our minds he’d be into it,” Cabrera says. That ended up becoming “Apaga La Luz.”

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So much of what excites RØZ about the music scene in Mexico is precisely how genre agnostic it’s become, and that you’re seeing collabs like Peso Pluma uniting with an EDM duo — and the international impact is huge. “The top global song is a Mexican reggaeton song,” Lara says. “There are a lot of things happening, and we just want to always bring something new to the table.”

They’re already mapping out 2026 with more shows and more music, all with a new sense of certainty in what they’re doing. “I wouldn’t say we believe more in ourselves, but we understand having the courage of innovating or doing something completely different, even if it feels off — of learning to be brave and doing something, even if it sounds like something completely different,” Cabrera says. “We’re embracing it and challenging ourselves to do that more often,” Lara adds. “We want to keep introducing people to this space.”