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How Grupo Frontera Is Repping the Border and Making Mexican Music Pop

Grupo Frontera share their tour ambitions, talk TikTok, songs and what's next.

In the three brief years it has been together, Grupo Frontera has transformed from a cohort playing covers at quinceañeras into a Mexican American boy band commanding some of the world’s largest stages — where it’s sometimes accompanied by legends its members looked up to while growing up, like Ramón Ayala, and other huge stars it has now recorded with, like Peso Pluma, Maluma and Nicki Nicole. “I feel that they’ve created a powerful movement and opened the path for more bands and for the public to reconnect with a genre that had been under the radar several years,” says Edgar Barrera, the Grammy- and Latin Grammy-winning songwriter who has written dozens of songs for the group and has been a mentor to it. The Rio Grande Valley is also home to Intocable, one of the most successful norteño bands ever, and the region has historically produced talented musicians and even a handful of breakthrough stars — Bobby Pulido, Duelo and Freddy Fender among them — in spite of lacking the infrastructure that helps groups take the next big step.

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