Vilma Palma e Vampiros

A graffito on a shutter in Rosario

The name came off a wall. Employees of a furniture shop in Rosario that had just closed painted a complaint about the management across the metal shutters — "Vilma Palma e Hijos Vampiros de los Obreros", Vilma Palma and Sons, vampires of the workers. Weather took the middle out of it. By 1991 what was still readable said Vilma Palma e Vampiros, and the band that formed in the city in 1990 around Mario "Pájaro" Gómez, guitarist Jorge Risso and bassist Gerardo "Largo" Pugliani took it as it stood.

Gómez had form in the city's scene long before that. He played in Identikit alongside Fito Páez between 1979 and 1981, one of several Rosario projects — Sangre Púrpura among them — that fed into the group. What arrived in 1990 was not an art-rock proposition but something built to move a room: guitars pushed up against Latin percussion, two women singing behind the lead, and lyrics about sex and cars delivered with no apparent embarrassment. Argentine rock at the time was still heavily weighted towards seriousness. Vilma Palma were not.

The records that did the damage

Prominence arrived in 1992 with "Bye, Bye" and "La Pachanga". The debut album sold beyond a million copies and brought the band their first gold disc, presented on television by Silvio Soldán on the programme Feliz domingo — a detail Gómez still brings up, and one that dates the band precisely to a moment when Argentine pop success was measured in shifted units and Sunday-afternoon broadcasts.

The follow-up, 3980, came in 1993 and holds most of what a crowd now demands: "Auto rojo", "Mojada", "Te quiero tanto", "Travestis". Fondo Profundo in 1994 carried the band properly across the continent, and the run continued with Ángeles y Demonios in 1997, Hecatombe in 1998 and 7 in 2000. Eighteen studio and live records are now attached to the name.

The catalogue since has been thinner and later: a reunion document, Grandes éxitos en vivo en Buenos Aires, issued on CD and DVD in 2008; 20 10, which produced "La fiesta del final"; Agarrate Fuerte in 2012, the eleventh studio album; and Boomerang in 2018, still the most recent full-length.

The split, Los Angeles, and the long second act

The original group came apart in May 2001. Gómez and Pugliani kept the name and moved the operation to Los Angeles, assembling a band around themselves and releasing Vuelve a comenzar. In 2007 they went back to playing the hits as a body of work rather than a phase, and the live album that followed set the template the band has used ever since.

The membership has churned steadily across three decades, but the current eight-piece has held together for some years: Gómez on vocals, Pugliani on bass, Carlos "Oveja" González on drums, Karina Di Lorenzo and Fabiana Díaz on backing vocals, Pablo Cejas on guitar, Martín Cura on keyboards and Luciano "Lucho" Cristini on percussion. Risso, who wrote much of the early material, is no longer on stage with them.

Thirty-five years, then thirty-six

The anniversary cycle has run long. Speaking to La Nación on 20 February 2025, Gómez called the band's continued pull "a blessing" and put it plainly: "Hay pocas bandas de los 90, muy pocas, que sigan así de vigentes" — very few nineties bands are still this current. A week later, on 28 February, they played the Bizarren Miusik Parti at GEBA in Buenos Aires, hosted by the same Soldán who had handed over the gold disc decades earlier.

Mexico took them back in March 2025 for Foro Arpa in Querétaro on the 13th, Teatro Diana in Guadalajara on the 14th and a slot at Vive Latino. The 2026 run has been busier still. They played the Pepsi Center WTC in Mexico City on 20 February, their first Mexico City show in four years, and the Escenario GNP Seguros in Monterrey the following night. Peru came in June — Festival de Rock Pilsen in Trujillo on the 27th, Rock en Lima at the Estadio San Marcos on the 28th. August brought Montevideo on the 24th, playing the Noche de la Nostalgia at the LATU innovation park, and Tegucigalpa on the 28th.

A United States leg opened at the James L. Knight Center in Miami on 18 September 2026 and runs through House of Blues Orlando on the 19th, Atlanta on the 20th, the Premier Event Center in Charlotte on the 23rd, El Ranchón in Woodbridge, Virginia on the 25th and the Ritz Theatre in Elizabeth, New Jersey on the 26th. The Rocklatam Festival in Guayaquil follows on 17 October.

Singles into a void

New recording has become sporadic and deliberately so. The 2024 run produced "Carmín", "Me siento loco" — which shared its title with that year's tour — an "Auto Rojo" remix and a live "Lo que pienso de vos". The most recent release listed is a new single version of "La Pachanga", issued on 12 June 2026.

Asked in August 2026 why there is no album behind those tracks, Gómez said he has a pile of songs he wants to record and does not know how he will do them, and that individual tracks disappear too quickly in streaming to feel worth the chase. He is under no label clock. The same interview had him admitting the working conditions have changed at the other end too: no more staying out after a gig, early nights instead.

The audience has meanwhile been refreshed from outside the band's own efforts. Karol G brought Gómez onto her stage in May 2022 to sing "Auto rojo" together, he arriving with a bouquet; TikTok has done the rest. Gómez told a Monterrey outlet in February 2026 that the crowd has visibly changed and that he now sees a lot of young people. The band's streaming figures were put at 4.2 million monthly listeners around the same time.

What the set looks like now

The current show is unapologetically a hits show, and Gómez says so openly: the band reinvent themselves on record, but live, the audience wants the hits. That does not make it short. At the Pepsi Center WTC on 20 February 2026 they were on from 8.50pm to 10.45pm and worked through 28 items — a 20-song main set and a long tail of encores that included a cover of José Alfredo Jiménez's "El rey" and a closing "Otra canción de amor" folded into "Let It Be".

The running order barely moves. "Me vuelvo loco por vos" opens, "Bye, Bye" follows, then "Mojada", "Travestis", "Todo lo que fue", "Síndrome de amor" and "Verano traidor". "Voy a vos" is the newest thing most nights. "Fondo profundo", "Auto rojo" and "La pachanga" close the main set, and the band routinely go back and replay "Mojada", "Bye, Bye" and "La pachanga" a second time on shouted demand rather than write a new ending. The Mexico City write-ups described a nineties party attended by more than one generation rather than a straightforward nostalgia trade.

A festival slot compresses it without rearranging it. At Rock en Lima on 28 June 2026 they went on at 2am and played 19 songs in 75 minutes, dropping "Secretos", "Gin Tonic" and "Estar con vos" but keeping the same opening four and the same triple-reprise finish.