For Carnival 2025, Kes’s debut single, Cocoa Tea, has topped the US iTunes reggae chart as well as several streaming services, charts, and playlists in the US and other nations in the area.
According to a media release, the song was made available on November 15, right before the South Trinidadian brothers’ band left on their third yearly East Coast Tour of the United States.
During the November 24 to December 5, 2024 tour, which brought the band to 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 in just two weeks, and it was included in thousands of streaming playlists.
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Adam Gross, president of Ineffable Records, released new data in mid-December that demonstrated the song’s widespread popularity and interest expanding quickly in less than a month without a formal music video.
He stated, “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!”
“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, Michael “Tano” Montano, and Mical Teja, the current Road March King, wrote the song. Tano, emerging star Denzil “Coutain,” and Terri Lyons provided the backing vocals.
Gross stated, “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 ten streamed songs as well.”
He additionally noted, “The song is going viral on TikTok, 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.”
After the YouTube video received one million views in a single week, lead vocalist Kees Dieffenthaller thanked all of the band’s friends and admirers, recalling a period when Kes was not a well-known figure in the diaspora.
He remarked with excitement, “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 February 25, in Queen’s Park Savannah in Port of Spain, the band will commemorate its 20th anniversary at their yearly Carnival Festival Experience, IZWE 2025, according to the press release.
On November 18, the group made a limited number of tickets available for pre-sale online at kestheband.com and izwefestival.com.
