Los Lobos

roots · americana · rock

Los Lobos is a rock band from East Los Angeles formed in 1973 by David Hidalgo, Louie Perez, Cesar Rosas and Conrad Lozano, together with Francisco Gonzalez, who left in 1976 and died in 2022. Saxophonist and keyboardist Steve Berlin joined in 1982 and all five current members remain in the group, an unusually stable lineup for a band of its age. The music blends rock and roll with traditional Mexican styles, Tex-Mex, blues, soul and R&B, and the instrumentation reflects that: Hidalgo plays guitar, accordion, fiddle and requinto jarocho, Rosas guitar and bajo sexto, Lozano bass and guitarron, and Perez drums, guitar and jarana huasteca, so a set can move from an electric blues to an acoustic son jarocho without changing personnel. The band's early albums for Slash and Warner Bros., particularly How Will the Wolf Survive? (1984), established it critically, and Kiko (1992) is widely treated as its most adventurous record. Los Lobos has been nominated for twelve Grammy Awards and won four: best Mexican-American song in 1984, best Mexican-American album in 1990 for the all-acoustic La Pistola y el Corazon, best pop instrumental performance in 1996, and best Americana album in 2022 for Native Sons, a covers record of Los Angeles songs released on New West. Its version of La Bamba topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1987 and made the band internationally known. Later honors include a Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011, induction into the Austin City Limits Hall of Fame in 2018 and a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2021. The group also recorded the Spanish-language Christmas album Llego Navidad in 2019, and a documentary, Los Lobos Native Sons, premiered at South by Southwest in 2026.

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