Santos Bravos became the first Latin American band to play the KCON festival

Santos Bravos became the first Latin American act ever to play KCON, the three-day Korean pop culture festival that has run every year since 2013. The five of them took the Artist Stage at the Los Angeles Convention Center on 14 August 2026, the opening night, and the Los Angeles Times published Christine Terrisse's interview with the group ten days later.

The band had been together less than a year. Its members are Kauê Penna, 19, from São João de Meriti in Brazil; Kenneth Lavíll, 16, from Veracruz in Mexico; Gabi Bermúdez, 21, from San Juan in Puerto Rico; Alejandro Aramburú, 22, from Lima; and Drew Venegas, 26, from Los Angeles County. Between them they speak and sing in three languages.

The song they took on was 'Hooligan', a track from the BTS album 'Arirang' with lyrics in Korean and English, produced by the Spanish pair Fakeguido and El Guincho with Ghstloop from South Korea and the American Jasper Harris. BTS songs get covered often at KCON, but Santos Bravos sit under the same parent label, Hybe, so the bar was higher. The crowd roared when Penna slid onstage to take Jungkook's high parts.

The group exists because Hybe wanted to export its method. Santos Bravos operate under Hybe Latin America, based in Mexico City, and are the first Hybe act headquartered outside the United States or Asia. They were picked from 17 finalists on a 2025 competition series built around the band's formation, coached along the way by Son Sung-deuk, formerly the longtime choreographer and performance director for BTS, and by the Cuban American choreographer Cultura, whose credits include Maluma, J Balvin and Karol G.

None of the five arrived as amateurs. Lavíll and Aramburú had worked as professional actors at home, Penna won the fifth season of The Voice Kids Brasil in 2020, Bermúdez had been chasing a solo career, and Venegas had danced behind BTS and spent a short spell in the group Future X. The final five debuted at the series finale in October 2025, in front of 10,000 people at the Auditorio Nacional in Mexico.

The first year has moved fast. They topped Billboard's new Latin music poll, performed alongside Mon Laferte and Feid at Willy Chavarria's Paris runway show in January, took their debut EP 'Dual' to No. 17 on the Billboard Top Latin Pop Albums chart in June, and won the fan-voted duo or group prize at the 2026 Premios Tu Música Urbano Mix that same month.

They do not sing in Korean unless it is for fun, but the traffic runs both ways. They have visited Hybe's Seoul headquarters, worked with Le Sserafim and BoyNextDoor, livestreamed to fans on Weverse and appeared on Korean television. "We as Santos Bravos want to transmit to the world that Latin America is one," Bermúdez said, pushing back at the habit of sorting Latinos into categories.

KCON keeps growing, and we covered the 2026 edition when the festival drew big crowds to the Los Angeles Convention Center and when the K-pop singer Evan previewed a solo EP on his way there. Hybe has had a harder year off stage, with Korean police moving to refer its chairman Bang Si-hyuk to prosecutors. The group's music is filed under pop here, and the bills we track sit on the festival tracker.

Less than a year after their debut, Santos Bravos were on a KCON stage in Los Angeles singing a BTS song to a crowd that had not come for them.