Grupo Frontera will add music to the patriotic celebrations in Mexico. The Mexican-American band will perform at the capital’s Zócalo — the country’s most important public square — on Sept. 15 for the annual Grito de Independencia event, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador announced Wednesday (Aug. 23).
“The members of Grupo Frontera will be there on September 15 at night in the Zócalo,” said the Mexican president at the end of his usual morning conference, where he played Frontera’s cover of “No Se Va,” originally by Colombian group Morat.
López Obrador reiterated his taste for the music of the regional Mexican group, which he has included in his playlist to challenge corridos tumbados, a musical genre that although he has said he will not prohibit, he considers to glorify drug traffickers.
Grupo Frontera joins a long list of national and international artists who have set foot in the second-largest public square in the world, only behind Tiananmen in Beijing. Musicians such as Paul McCartney, Justin Bieber, Manu Chao, Shakira, Café Tacvba and the late icon of regional Mexican music Vicente Fernández, among many others, have performed at the Zócalo.
The attendance record for free concerts held in the so-called Primer Cuadro in the Mexican capital is held by the Argentine rock band Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, which achieved the milestone of gathering 300,000 people on the night of June 3, beating Grupo Firme, who held the record after summoning 280,000 people in September 2022, according to figures from the government of Mexico City.
This week, the sextet scored their first top 10 hit on a Billboard album chart with El Comienzo, which jumped 39-4 on the Top Latin Albums chart on Aug. 19 after its first full week of activity. El Comienzo also jumped 12-2 on Regional Mexican Albums and debuted at No. 39 on the Billboard 200 all-genre chart.
Grupo Frontera is set to be part of the 2023 Billboard Latin Music Week, taking place Oct. 2-6 in Miami. Purchase tickets to Latin Music Week here.
