Fabi Reyna is not just making music, she’s building worlds. As the force behind Reyna Tropical, Reyna stands at the intersection of sound, land, identity, and memory, crafting a body of work that’s as emotionally rich as it is rhythmically infectious.
Since forming Reyna Tropical in 2016 alongside producer Nectali “Sumohair” Diaz, Reyna has carved out a space for tropical futurism rooted in ancestral knowledge and queer liberation. What started as an intuitive, heart-first collaboration grew into something far more expansive: a living, breathing archive of diasporic connection and land-based reverence. Their self-titled debut EP blended Afro-Indigenous rhythms, dreamy guitar loops, and field recordings, music made not for the industry, but for the soul.
Reyna herself was already reshaping the cultural landscape before the band took off. As the founder of She Shreds Magazine, the first publication dedicated to women and nonbinary guitarists, she helped redefine who gets to be seen and heard in music. But Reyna Tropical offered her something different; a return to her roots, a creative exhale, and eventually, a path forward through grief and transformation.
After years of touring and growth, the project transitioned into a solo act following the passing of Diaz. In that transition, Reyna didn’t just keep going, she deepened. Her debut full-length album, Malegría, became a container for all that had come before and all that was still unfolding: love, loss, queer joy, feminine sensuality, and the sacredness of land.
But Reyna’s art extends far beyond a single record. Her live shows are ceremonies. Her creative process is a dialogue with the land, whether she’s performing in a black box theater or standing beside a river. She brings flowers and native plants to her sets, learns about the local ecology, and reminds audiences that the earth is not a backdrop, it’s a collaborator.
For Reyna, music is a portal. A place to explore intuitive knowledge, reconnect with memory, and challenge systems that commodify healing. Her sound invites us to feel without needing to fix, to move even when we’re mourning, and to remember that joy and pain often live side by side. “Home,” she says, “is ever evolving. But the land will always remind you when you’re there.”
Whether on stage or in stillness, Fabi Reyna is creating a sonic homeland for those searching for themselves, their people, and the ancestral echoes that guide them. Reyna Tropical isn’t just music you listen to. It’s music you remember.
Check out an excerpt from her interview with La Molly plus a playlist full of her best songs to heal to, below.
La Molly: Your work is very deeply grounded in a lot of land based wisdom, ancestral connection, and diasporic identity. Can you talk about a specific moment during your travels when you felt the music and the land were speaking to you most clearly?
Fabi Reyna: I can think more about when that hasn’t happened, like even when I’m in a black box in a venue, the land is still there, the land is still under my feet. You know, I’m still connecting with land. It’s still about land. It’s still about recognizing her. And so there’s not a memory that comes to mind. And that didn’t feel like the intention and that didn’t feel like that was the connection and that that didn’t come through. You know we always bring flowers and plants, and we take the opportunity to learn about what plants are native to the places that we’re playing and to visit the water. And so even if there’s no plan for insight. We still carry the land and that’s the whole point of what we do, right. It’s like, even when you think you kill the native plants, when you think you kill the native trees you don’t because they live within us and we carry that seed. And so that’s important. That’s always important to me, even when I’m playing, you know that that’s the news that I’m reminding myself and I’m reminding the audience. And I am kind of recognizing that with my ancestors that land is first, like we’re always with her. She’s always with us.
LM: And in a time like this, where there’s so much disconnection from our land, from our roots, both literal and metaphorical, what would you say to someone who is trying to reconnect?
FR: I mean listening is the biggest teacher, I think listening is something that we don’t do often enough and that we don’t give enough credit to even if that’s being in silence. And being able to listen to ourselves and our deepest intuitions and the memories that come up more in stillness, a lot of you know, a lot of listening. That’s my number one that’s I think the first step in reconnecting is to listen to the wisdom that already exists, to the elders, to ourselves, to our pain, to our joys, you know, and to face them and to be in that movement, right, like to use the technologies that we’ve been offered by our ancestors by day, like singing like creating, like weaving and to weave all of our griefs and all of our pains and to this beautiful creation.
Check out this Spotify playlist La Molly put together of Reyna Tropical’s work.