Gondwana

A Santiago housing estate, 1987

Gondwana started in 1987 in La Pincoya, a working-class district on the northern edge of Santiago, built around the bassist I-Locks Labbé, who founded the group and still plays bass in it. Labbé has pointed to Bob Marley and The Police as the two starting points, an unusual pairing that explains a good deal about how the band's early arrangements sat between roots reggae and new-wave pop phrasing.

The group then waited. For more than a decade it worked small halls, clubs and university events without a record to its name, in a country with no reggae industry to speak of. A support slot for the Argentine band Los Pericos in 1994 lifted its profile, and the arrival of the singer Enrique ‘Quique' Neira — born on 11 April 1973, previously of the band Bambu — gave Gondwana the voice it needed. The debut album did not appear until 1997, ten years after the band formed.

The three albums everything still rests on

‘Gondwana' (1997), ‘Alabanza (Por la Fuerza de la Razón)' (2000) — released internationally as ‘Second Coming' — and ‘Made in Jamaica' (2002) are the records that matter. All three came out with Neira singing, and the band worked with Dr Dread of the Washington label RAS Records, which took a Chilean group with no obvious route out of Santiago into the American and Jamaican reggae circuit. Gondwana played Jamaica and the United States off the back of them.

The songs from that window are the ones audiences still arrive for: ‘Sentimiento Original', ‘Felicidad', ‘Antonia', ‘Armonía de Amor', ‘Verde, amarillo y rojo', ‘Ignorancia'. They set the template for reggae sung in Spanish across Latin America — romantic material and social material sitting on the same record without apology, the brass doing much of the melodic work, the lyrics plain rather than coded.

Twenty-three years apart

Neira left after ‘Made in Jamaica' and released his solo debut, ‘Eleven', in 2003. A substantial run followed — ‘Cosas Buenas' (2005), ‘Jah Rock' (2007), ‘Jah Dub' (2010), ‘Alma' (2011), ‘Un Amor' (2014), ‘La Vida Es Una Canción Vol. 1' (2017) and its second volume (2019). He took the Altazor award for best pop ballad and an APES award for best composer, both in 2006, and has sat on the board of Chile's rights society, the SCD.

Gondwana carried on without him and kept releasing: ‘Crece' (2005), ‘Resiliente' (2007), a live CD and DVD recorded in Buenos Aires (2010), ‘Revolución' (2011), ‘Reggae and Roll' (2014) and ‘Carpe Diem' (2017), which remains the band's most recent album. Maxi Vargas took the lead vocal. The keyboard player Keno Valenzuela has described the band's defining quality as resilience, which is also the title of one of those records; by his count the group's longevity comes from reggae itself ageing slowly.

The touring line-up listed around the band's Dominican Republic debut — its first show there, at the Hard Rock Café in Santo Domingo on 22 April 2026 — was Labbé on bass, Vargas on vocals, Jorge Ramos on saxophone, Francisco Martínez and Nelson López on guitars, Leo Dread on percussion, Benjamín Zúñiga on drums and Valenzuela on keyboards.

How the reunion happened

The reconciliation was slow and private before it was public. Labbé has said the REC festival in Concepción was ‘the culmination of a series of meetings and conversations', and Neira framed the timing as circumstantial rather than strategic: ‘life itself was preparing us for this moment of reunion, finding us in very special circumstances of our own lives'. Neither man committed to anything permanent.

In early May 2026 they announced a single show: 5 September 2026 at the Estadio Bicentenario de La Florida in Santiago, tickets from 25,000 pesos through Puntoticket, with a set drawn from the three albums they made together and the night recorded for later release. By the time the concert arrived it had sold out. Neira also disclosed that he and Labbé had recorded together again for the first time in over twenty years, on ‘Lo que no vivimos', a song written for his father and cut with the Peruvian singer Gian Marco, released that May.

Gondwana's own new recorded work in 2026 has been collaborative rather than self-contained: the band features on ‘Amor Suicida' with the Madrid artist Huecco, released in March 2026 on his album ‘CrazyXXversario'.

Where they stand in October 2026

What was billed as one night became a year-long tour. In late September 2026 the reunion played three sold-out Mexican dates — roughly 10,000 people at the Auditorio Nacional in Mexico City, reported as the first complete sell-out of that hall by a Latin reggae act, about 5,000 in Monterrey and about 2,000 in Guadalajara — followed by Tijuana and then Europe: La Riviera in Madrid on 6 October and Razzmatazz in Barcelona on 7 October.

On 11 October 2026 the band plays Rock al Parque in Bogotá, billed as Gondwana & Quique Neira, on the Tarima Bio by Vans from 9pm to 10pm on the festival's second day — a free event in Parque Simón Bolívar marking the festival's thirtieth anniversary, with over sixty acts across four stages. Quito's Plaza de Toros Monumental follows on 6 November, then Lima's Costa 21 on 12 November, the only date currently on sale, promoted as ‘Volvamos a ese sentimiento original'; Peruvian pricing ran at 320 soles for Campo A and 194 for Campo B, with a 15 per cent Banco Falabella discount, through Teleticket. Color Caribe in Dorado, Puerto Rico, is scheduled for late November.

The longer-term marker landed on 8 October 2026, when Lollapalooza Chile confirmed Gondwana & Quique Neira on the line-up for its fifteenth Chilean edition, at Parque O'Higgins in Santiago on 12, 13 and 14 March 2027, alongside Travis Scott, The Killers, Charli XCX and David Guetta. Labbé has also said more Chilean dates and a national tour are being prepared, and that the band's reading of the moment is a message of affection, peace and spirituality.