Mula is a Dominican band that puts Caribbean rhythms through electronic music. It is a trio: the twin sisters Anabel and Cristabel Acevedo, who sing and write, and Rachel Rojas, who produces.

Los Girasoles, 2015

The sisters had been working together before, and the group took its final shape at the end of 2015 when Rojas joined and completed it. They come out of Los Girasoles, in Santo Domingo.

Their training is not what the music sounds like. Anabel studied percussion and played drums at home; Cristabel concentrated on classical guitar; Rojas studied electronic music production. Three formal educations pointing in different directions, pulled into one sound.

Neo-perreo

VICE filed them under neo-perreo in 2017, which is the closest available label: the shape of reggaetón and perreo taken apart and rebuilt with synthesisers, by women, for a different room than the one perreo was written for.

A festival billing once described what they do as a journey toward a Caribbean of the future, and that is the useful frame. The rhythms underneath are recognisable — the palos, the dembow, the merengue pulse — but everything above them is built rather than played.

Working against the room

The Dominican electronic scene is overwhelmingly male, and the North American press has covered them explicitly on those terms: a band breaking into a space where men set the rules. They have made that fact part of the work rather than a footnote to it.

The records

The self-titled debut came in March 2015, followed by a remix set the same year. Retumba, No Hay Manera and Nunca Paran ran through 2016; Aguas, the album, arrived in March 2017; Siren in 2018; Ella Sabe and Y Ahora in 2019.

Mundos came in November 2020, Ven Vamos in 2022, Grandes Escobas in March 2025 and the album Eterna that June — a decade of steady work, which in Dominican alternative music is itself an achievement.