Latin Londoners #42: REYKO, Electronic Music Duo

The London based electronic music outfit REYKO is made up of Soleil and Igor, both from Spain. The duo first began capturing attention with several viral songs surpassing overall 40 million streams, and breaking through to commercials, TV theme tunes and movie soundtracks. The success led to the release of their critically acclaimed self-titled debut album in 2020: a hypnotic electropop effort where Soleil's unique hush voice and melodies breeze above the electronic beats, digital basses and sparse guitars produced by Igor. Now back with recently released singles 'The Game", "Saturday" or "She Said" ahead of their 2nd album, out on October 1st, we find out more about these curious and original music creators ahead of their show this weekend.

by Amaranta Wright

Our connections to London were mostly through music as both our parents used to play English bands all the time (Police, Phil Collins, Queen, etc...)I grew up in Madrid and moved to London to study osteopathy. (Soleil) I grew up in Barcelona and come from a family of former athletes. I played tennis professionally before he decided to pursue a career in music at 21 years old. I moved here to get involved in the music scene. (Igor)

We met in a pub in North London. At the time Igor was looking for a singer in order to complete a final project of the master degree in music production that he was studying at the time, at the University of West London. We wrote and recorded a few songs and very soon realised that there was something there in the music they had made that needed to be pursued further than a uni project. As soon as we wrote the 1st few songs together we knew we needed to pursue the project and form the band as we felt there was something special about it. Soon after, we started posting songs regularly on soundcloud.

Our biggest breakthrough is probably our song “Hierba Mala” which being placed in the Netflix series Elite. It has given us a lot of exposure in many countries. REYKO has had many songs placed in commercials, Netflix series, trailers, etc...and that has been a turning point and key for our international exposure.

When we write songs we learn a lot about ourselves and the way we see the world. We love meeting new people when we play in different countries, it's very inspiring.

The biggest obstacles we’ve had to overcome is (literally 6 months after we started !) signing some dodgy deals with some dodgy record label so we had to get lawyers to get out of them. We did manage to do it but we learnt a good lesson about the industry !

Coming from the outside, maybe we see things in a more culturally open way and are used to mixed different cultures and costumes with our own.

I would tell my younger self “Listen to other people, but listen to yourself the most. You know best what's best for you.” (Igor)

Our life consists of making music in our home studio in west London. Rehearsing for the coming live shows. Trying to meet as many people and hang out with as many friends as possible after the claustrophobic 2020 !

We love London for…That certain undefinable energy that keeps you creative. Don’t like…the carpets!

Favourite word in English? Brilliant

Worst word in English? Moist