Empanadas Ilegales

***Somewhere between Vancouver and Montreal, between cumbia and the cosmos, between the apocalypse and the dancefloor, there is a laboratory.

Inside it, Empanadas Ilegales have spent nearly a decade breaking tropical music down to its bones, recombining it under pressure, and testing what comes out the other side. LABORATORIO TROPICAL, their fourth album, is the report from the lab.

The record came together in the way the band works best: in motion. The first sessions happened at the tail end of their Fall 2025 tour, tracked at Sud Ouest Studios in Montreal with engineer William Poulin, with ideas channelled straight from the road. The stems then traveled west to Vancouver's Afterlife Studios, where the record took shape over a handful of sessions that were mixed by John Raham. These sounds were fine-tuned by Grammy Award-winning mastering engineer Adam Ayan; the resulting album is a dramatic journey through Empanadas Ilegales’ expanding psychedelic universe.