Ten Paraguayan Artists You Need to Hear
From guarania to hip-hop, cumbia to punk: these are the sounds that define a nation.
Despite being a small country in terms of population, Paraguay packs a serious musical punch. Its huge range of bands and solo artists have carried Paraguayan culture far beyond South America. In fact, many of Paraguay’s musical greats have built international followings precisely because a lack of opportunities — and in several cases, political persecution — back home.
Think Paraguayan music, and a few motifs come to mind: nostalgia, romance, the passing of a gourd of tereré (chilled yerba mate) or a bottle of rum in the shade of a mango tree. Running through the chords and bars is guaraní (one of Paraguay’s two official languages), as well as jopara: the mixture of the Indigenous-origin dialect with Spanish that is widely spoken across the country.
Following our recent round-ups of the best in Paraguayan cinema and literature, The Paraguay Post went in search of the country’s defining melodic expressions. How does Paraguay communicate its essence via the harp or guitar strings? Is there an essential, age-old Paraguayan sound? Or is the country’s truest musical tradition one of reinvention and rebellion?
10. Vecindad Autopsia
Taking an irreverent approach to life is a Paraguayan national pastime. So who better than Vecindad Autopsia to kick off our setlist?
Born in 2002 in the southeastern border city of Presidente Franco, the band’s original line-up saw Alfredo Duarte on vocals and guitar, Augusto Invernizzi on bass, and Jorge Argüello on drums. They took punk, mixed it with the local rhythms of polka — itself an energetic Paraguayan twist on the stately European version — and sprinkled jopará lyrics on top.
The resulting subgenre — polka-punk — proved wildly catchy. Emblematic originals and covers include Sífilis en do mayor, Ka´u remember, Paraguarí, María Kandé and Rohejata che morena. A quarter of a century-later, the group continue to keep young and not-so-young people alike pogoing with their infectious mix of rock, ska, and head-banging fusion folklore.
9. Tekovete
The guaraní-language rapper Tekovete represents roots, pride, and a cultural movement that goes from strength to strength — in Paraguay and the world.
Miguel “Tekovete” Ávalos was born in Lambaré to a well-known musician father, before moving to Ypané, where the capital’s sprawl thins into countryside: a context that shines through in his lyrics. At 18, he dropped his first EP Arandú, a co-production with long-standing collaborator Johnny Cutz. Today, Ávalos and his partner Noemí Ortega compose quick flows, rapid-fire rhymes, and stories of the suburbs in jopara: all blended with samples of Paraguayan folkloric classics.
In an interview with the Post, Ávalos explains how he uses rap as a tool to promote Paraguayan culture. “I know that a gringo can listen to my music and nod their head, because they’ll feel that it’s real,” he adds. Ávalos recalls how the last time he played the Curitiba jazz festival — together with the band Guerrilla Soul — many of the Brazilian and international crowd connected more with his Guaraní lyrics than those in Spanish.
Ávalos typically writes sat under a tree, feeling that meditation in nature unlocks his creativity. From such moments emerge nostalgic tracks like Evy´akena (Be Happy) y Aguyje (Thank You); social critiques like Haupéicha (And That’s How) and Pyra Rap (Pure rap). While he’s written diss tracks like Trapo ky´a (Dirty Cloth), he’s also turned his fire on modern materialism with songs like Arriero machetero (Working Man): a tribute to the hard-toiling Paraguayan labourer.
8. Revolber FX
Revolber emerged in 1999, just months after a power struggle between Paraguay’s post-dictatorship elites lead to the assassination of the vice-president and the fatal shooting of seven protesters: an episode known as the marzo paraguayo. Also from Presidente Franco, this backdrop seemed to give the band an implacable thirst for freedom of expression: something personified in their multilingual lyrics, social critique, and blend of musical styles.
They recorded three albums, two EPs, two documentaries about urban and prison life — Vivo en Tacumbú and Un revólver en la Chaca. Their music videos also made a mark too, including the trailer to hit Paraguayan film 7 Cajas, which used their song Huye Hermano. Tracks like El solo, Astronauta Casero, 7 hermanos y un misil, Real peso guaraní and Casa nueva, among others, continue to be mainstays of the urban songbook across Paraguay.
Today, many of its old members continue to make music across different projects — among them Guerrilla Soul, and singer Patrick Altamirano in his solo career.
7. Kchiporros
Several times winner of a Golden Record — a prize given to those tracks that get more than 1.25 million listens in the previous year — Kchiporros are the stadium-fillers that have headlined concerts, kicked off football matches, and dominated the Paraguayan mainstream for going on twenty years.
Born out of jam sessions between university friends in Asunción in 2006, their bold, idiosyncratic lyrics and proud championing of cumbia — a working-class, electronic musical movement popular across Latin America — have propelled them to the top of the Paraguayan pops. They’re living proof that an unapologetic, upbeat and versatile sound will often triumph over refined taste.
With 10 albums, long and short, to their name, the group has come to encompass pop-rock, ska, reggae and cachaca: Paraguay’s homegrown, synthesiser-heavy take on cumbia. In their latest offering, Todo el mundo está kaliente, Kchiporros plant their flag in North American genres, with the album featuring fragments of rap and Mexican norteña music.
6. Los tres sudamericanos
The sound of Christmas in Paraguay — and for me, the most moving interpreters of the classic song Pájaro campana — this folkloric trio was formed by vocalist Alma María Vaesken, her husband Juan “Johnny” Torales, and Casto Darío Martínez.
Few in Paraguay know los tres sudamericanos by name: after failing to make it big back home, they spend most of their careers in Europe, becoming wandering troubadours for a sunny, tropical variety of Latin folkloric pop. “I know Spain better than my own country,” Vaesken told Revista Visión Media in 2017. “I barely know half of Paraguay.”
But their 1969 album “Navidad de Flor de coco” — a nod to the fragrant, furry-sheathed flower cluster that often accompanies household nativity scenes — contains Christmas hits like Navidad del Paraguay, Repican las Campanas and Noche de paz that are a staple of the festive period. And since 2012, they have officially been recognised as Beloved Children of the City of Asunción.
5. Lizza Bogado
María Lizzarela Bogado is a singer and composer of Paraguayan polka, both in its traditional and modern forms. Born in Asunción, and with a career spanning more than forty years, the Centro Cultural del Cabildo officially declared her the voice of Paraguay’s bicentenary celebrations in 2011.
Paraguayan polka — the syncopated beat that makes every Paraguayan’s heart pound faster — is Bogado’s means of connecting with the identity of a people deeply rooted in toil and struggle who have never lost the hope of a better tomorrow. Her voice is that of millions of Paraguayan women, who in the shadow of war, dictatorship and exile have long been the guardians and shapers of our culture.
In the song Un solo canto, Lizza challenges the infamous phrase of writer Augusto Roa Bastos that Paraguay “is the beloved of misfortune.” The same idea — refusing to give in to pessimism, and daring to dream of change — runs through Paraguay mi pasión, Taheñoi Jevy Ñanemba´e (What’s Ours Germinates Once More) — and Crecer y vencer, a track that can be found on her latest EP, Laboratorio del alma, released in 2024.
4. Emiliano R. Fernández
Narrowly missing out on the podium is Fernández (1894-1949), a musician and poet born in rural poverty who served in the Chaco War (1932-1935) and painted that tragic conflict in song. The homesickness, courage, and burning patriotism felt by veterans and their families are his primary colours.
His most stirring and beloved compositions include Ahama che china (Now I depart, my darling); 13 Tuyutí, in honour of his own regiment; Adiós che parahe kue (Farewell, my old home) — and Rojas Silva Rekavo (In Search of Rojas Silva), which describes how Bolivian invaders captured and killed the lieutenant of the same name: triggering the conflict that would leave some 100,000 dead.
In Fernández‘s retelling, Rojas Silva becomes a martyr and Paraguay’s conscript campesino armies his righteous avengers. Every September 17, the country celebrates the Day of Paraguayan Polka: a homage to Fernández and folkloric minstrel Luis Alberto del Paraná, who both died on the same date.
3. Berta Rojas
Perhaps Paraguay’s highest-profile living musician, Berta Rojas (born in Asunción in 1966) is a professor, researcher, and performer of classical guitar music, acclaimed for her interpretations that breathe new life into regional standards as well as her original compositions.
Olivia Balbuena, a guitarist with Paraguayan group Estuario Dúo, praises her deep musical knowledge, human feeling, and commitment to studying and reconstructing half-forgotten sounds. “She seems to widen Latin America’s musical past,” adds Balbuena, a former student of Rojas. “Musically, nobody in Paraguay today has gone further than her.”
This painstaking research into the continent’s musical heritage is evident in Rojas’s latest album, Las huellas de la cuerda (2025), where she accompanies players of various historic stringed instruments from across the region, including the Paraguayan harp. Her 2022 album Legado won a Latin Grammy (for best musical album): making her the first Paraguayan to win said prize.
2. José Asunción Flores
José “Asunción” Flores, was a musician, poet and political activist, born in 1904 in the Chacarita neighbourhood of Asunción — the city whose name he adopted as his own. A member of the Paraguayan Communist Party, he lived in exile from 1944 to his death in Buenos Aires in 1972: the result of persecution by the conservative Colorado Party, which still rules Paraguay to this day.
Flores is best known as the creator of the guarania. Recently recognised as part of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, this uniquely Paraguayan strain of orchestral music is unashamedly romantic and working-class. As ethnomusicologist Romy Martínez explained in a recent interview with Pausa, the guarania is a lyrical genre whose slow and wistful melodies seem to contradict the invitation to dance offered by its syncopated rhythm.
Flores’s most famous guaranias, set to words by poet Manuel Ortiz Guerrero, are India and Ne Rendape Aju (I’m On My Way to You). But others followed where he led, composing classic guaranias in their own right. These include Demetrio Ortiz with Recuerdos de Ypacaraí and Mis noches sin ti, Luis Alberto Del Paraná with Mi guitarra y mi voz, Félix “Maneco” Galeano’s Soy de la Chacarita and Mauricio Cardozo Ocampos with Galopera and Regalo de Amor.
1. Agustín Pío Barrios “Mangoré”
The lord of the tremolo, Paraguay’s most virtuoso musician, and bedrock of the country’s national musical identity: this list could only be closed out by classical guitarist and composer Agustín Pío Barrios (1885-1944). Though his works carry no lyrics, they paint vivid scenes from Paraguayan rural and urban life: for example, Danza Paraguaya, the three movements of La Catedral, and Julia Florida.
Born to an aristocratic family in San Juan Bautista, a former Jesuit mission settlement in southern Paraguay, he was among the first musicians to record classical guitar music on vinyl. He near single-handedly transformed the shabby six-strings played at rural fiestas into a prestigious instrument suitable for broadcast and concert halls. Some of the finest examples of his work include Madrigal, Contemplación y Mazurka apassionata.
Barrios too had to seek a living abroad, travelling to 20 countries and even reinventing himself as a mysterious Indigenous elder called Nitsuga Mangoré (Agustín backwards, plus the name of a historical native chief). He died poor and was buried in El Salvador, from where Paraguayan politicians periodically promise to bring him home. The last of his 300 works was a tremulous, plaintive piece titled Una limosna por el amor de Dios.
Yet since 2007 Barrios’s name, guitar, likeness, and a few bars of La Catedral have been immortalised on the 50,000-guaraní note. It’s a small gesture of historical reparation to a figure who — like so many others — has defied precarious conditions to proudly bring Paraguay’s rich musical identity to appreciative audiences both at home and around the world.
SPECIAL MENTION: Eight Emerging and Influential Artists
Luis Alberto del Paraná y Los Paraguayos — this poncho-wearing quartet brought the guarania to New York and beyond.
Lucero Sarambi — a young Afroparaguayan voice complete with beguiling theatrical performances and lots of promise.
Flou — Paraguay’s most influential metal group has opened for Guns N’ Roses, Korn and Aerosmith.
4lly — a strong Gen Z bet on electronic pop.
Cumbia Juan — chart-beating champions del barrio and possibly Paraguay’s most-streamed group.
Sabb Montes — a million miles from Mangoré, Montes and her outfit Milk Shake are pioneers of Paraguay’s urban music scene.
Quemil Yambay y Los Alfonsinos — undisputed kings of Paraguayan polka.
Sari Carri — A female crooner with a growing following, Carri sets tales of millennial life and love to traditional styles like bolero.
Who’s missing from the list? What makes Paraguayan music so special? And where are the best places to listen live? Let us know below: