Kes’ debut single for Carnival 2025, “Cocoa Tea,” has topped the US iTunes Reggae chart as well as several streaming platforms, charts, and playlists in the US and other nations in the area.
The song was published on November 15, right before the South Trinidadian brothers’ band left on their third yearly East Coast Tour of the United States.
- Advertisement -
In the first two weeks of the band’s November 24–December 5, 2024, tour, which rocked sold-out venues in Montreal, Boston, Philadelphia, Silver Springs, Maryland, Norfolk, Virginia, Raleigh, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia, the song’s lyric video on the band’s YouTube channel exploded to 1,000,000 views, and the song was added to thousands of streaming playlists.
Adam Gross, president of Ineffable Records, shared an update with statistics that demonstrated the song’s widespread popularity and interest had grown significantly in less than a month without the release of an official music video.
“Cocoa Tea came out three weeks ago and the numbers that it is doing are unprecedented for any Soca record and are the best numbers any Kes song has ever done out the gate, as it looks to hopefully be the biggest Kes record of all time!” he noted.
Adding, “The song has three million plays including 1.9 million on YouTube over 400,000 on Spotify, and almost 500,000 on Apple Music. On YouTube, it is still doing over 125,000 plays a day without an official music video. It’s number three on Toronto’s local pulse Spotify chart and sits at the top of Shazam charts in 20 different places.”
Kees Dieffenthaller, Tano, and Mical Teja wrote the song, and Tano, Coutain, and Terri Lyons provided the backing vocals. Gross also said: “Cocoa Tea” is currently number one in Trinidad, Guyana, Antigua, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, the British Virgin Islands Dominica, and Anguilla among several other countries it’s in the top 10 streamed songs as well.”
“The song is going viral on Tik Tok where it has been used in 66,000 different videos including 32,000 using the original sound. All of that together bringing in 61 million views on the song on TikTok,” he noted.
Lead vocalist Kees Dieffenthaller thanked all of the band’s friends and admirers when the YouTube video reached one million views in a single week. He recalled a period when the band was struggling to even receive radio in Trinidad and Tobago and Kees was not a household name throughout the diaspora.
He stated, “Real views. A million views, two weeks! Yuh know ah remember de days when we used to get a lotta trouble to get even airplay, so I give thanks for the day to see this. Thank you for the support, thank you for the love of the song and yo, this is the mission: we’ spreading this to the world, thank you very much!”
On November 18, the band made limited pre-sale tickets available online at kestheband.com and izwefestival.com. They will commemorate their 20th anniversary at IZWE 2025, which is set for February 25 at Queen’s Park Savannah in Port of Spain.
For the most recent information, follow @kesofficial on TikTok and @kesthebandofficial on Instagram.
