Out Of The Caribbean: Kes The Band Are Taking Soca to the Tiny Desk
Trinidad’s soca giants become only the second soca act ever to grace NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series, following Machel Montano’s 2025 debut. On May 8th, Trinidad’s ‘Kes The Band’ will become only the second Soca act in history to perform at NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series. The performance drops at 7 a.m. EST on NPR […]
Black News 
Trinidad’s soca giants become only the second soca act ever to grace NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series, following Machel Montano’s 2025 debut.
On May 8th, Trinidad’s ‘Kes The Band’ will become only the second Soca act in history to perform at NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series. The performance drops at 7 a.m. EST on NPR Music’s YouTube channel.
The Tiny Desk series draws an average monthly viewership of 44 million across digital platforms, an audience that, until very recently, had almost no exposure to soca music at all. It was Machel Montano who broke that barrier first, in January 2025, becoming the first soca artist ever to grace the Tiny Desk stage, a moment Caribbean music lovers had been waiting years for. Now, just over a year later, Kes will inject some much-needed culture into the brand once again.
Kes The Band is marking 20 years in music, and a Tiny Desk set at this stage of their career is a fitting way to add to the celebrations. The intimate, stripped-back format is designed to expose musicianship that big-stage spectacle can sometimes obscure. For a band whose artistry has always run deeper than fete anthems, Tiny Desk is the right room.
The set will feature special guests and reimagined fan favourites, foregrounding live instrumentation and the harmonies that have defined Kes’s sound across two decades. What a Tiny Desk appearance really offers is reach, the kind that introduces a band to listeners across the globe.
The series has historically drawn criticism for its narrow genre focus, and soca’s absence from those hallowed bookshelves for so long was part of a much larger pattern of institutional exclusion. Two appearances in 16 months don’t fix that. But Kes at the Tiny Desk is still a door being pushed open.
Soca and Caribbean music as a whole are still seen as ‘fringe’ and not mainstream; there are no Grammy or even MOBO Award categories for the many genres that are celebrated across the region daily.
This type of exposure can be seen as a wake-up call to the rest of the music industry.
