If you were tasked with summing up the history of Houston music into only two minutes of a track, how would you do it? Or would you find it impossible, given the rich history of iconic Houston artists?
Bombón, a DJ music collective co-founded by Gracie Chavez and Alex “DJ Navó” Nava in 2010, were selected to do just that for the official 2026 FIFA World Cup Houston Sonic ID. FIFA tasked local music producers and creators in all 16 World Cup host cities across the United States, Mexico and Canada to produce a remixed track of the official 2026 FIFA song that encompasses the sounds of their city.
“The challenge was giving FIFA something that represents Houston sonically, but that still feels authentically Bombón. Let me just say, no small feat,” Gracie Chavez, co-founder of Bombón, told The Barbed Wire.
Their first hurdle was getting selected by FIFA officials. The collective went up against iconic Houston talent that Chavez could only tell us on the record were “some typical people” that Houstonians are familiar with.
“The pitch was made that we could create something that sounded perhaps more international, but included some of those [Houston] elements,” Chavez said. “And I think for us, that was just innate in what we were already doing.”
The music, sound and international culture is what Chavez has been immersed in since she started in the DJ scene in the late ‘90s early ‘00s. While house music and hip hop was undoubtedly a big part of her music background, she saw and heard the city through a different lens: She’s the daughter of Mexican immigrants who grew up listening to her dad’s ever expanding record collection, including cumbia tropical. The Latin nights she was familiar with came with pricey covers, typically only professional-style salsa dancers and a very particular dress code; she wanted to see people dancing in a more inclusive environment that fused hip hop and cumbia tropical.
“I feel like cumbia music is more for the people, and I feel like we democratized the dance floor because of it,” Chavez explained. “[You] could hear Fito Olivares and then you might hear a Mike Jones track next with some dance hall. Houston is, and I’ll repeat this again, not New York, [Houston] is the most diverse city in the country. We’re an international hub. It resonated with our community like that.”
As they grew, so did their influence on Texas’ music scene. Rivera joined the collective in 2017, first as a DJ and then in 2018 Bombón launched its own label and began developing its own production house. At the time, music producer and artist Svani Quintanilla, nephew of the late Queen of Tejano, Selena Quintanilla, and son of A.B. Quintanilla III, was also part of the collective.
“Svani Quintanilla helped create the signature sound we call Screwmbia and so our label put out the first series of Screwmbia EPs that are still online,” Chavez said. “They really encapsulated what the sound in Houston was: chopping and screwing Cumbia.”
It’s a type of music that pays homage to the infamous DJ Screw, known in part for his ability to dramatically slow down music. But DJ Screw is just one portion of Houston’s long history of music, something the collective had to consider when creating their FIFA track.
In the late 1940s, Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton moved to Houston and left a deep influence in the Texas Blues scene. In the late 1960s and ‘70s, Lightnin’ Hopkins and ZZ Top brought their soul and rock and roll sounds to the city. The ‘80s and ‘90s then ushered in the hip-hop scene with greats like Geto Boys and DJ Screw. Artists in the 2000s and beyond continued building on hip-hop and R&B with music icons like Paul Wall, Mike Jones, UGK, Beyoncé, Solange Knowles, Travis Scott and Megan Thee Stallion.
“The picture I think that started to emerge, like, okay, let’s give them a welcome to Texas with the intro and so my thought was to tying it back into Texas blues,” Chavez explained.
Austin-based Ray “All Day Ray” Rivera, the executive producer for the FIFA Houston track, worked with producer Ricky “Deejay Quality” Gutierrez. Together they mixed the sounds on the final 2-minute, 7-second song.
“It’s always awesome to work on projects like these,” Rivera told The Barbed Wire. “You get 80 stems. So stems are just like the individual tracks, like the bass, the kick, the trumpets, it’s like 80 tracks that you can just play with.”
The crew began meeting and onboarding with FIFA officials in Switzerland in late August after they got word they’d been selected for the project.
“It was super cool, just trying to get the sound, how to make people proud [and say], ‘Hey, we’re Texas and we’re Houston’ and trying to incorporate all those elements in there while trying to remix the track too” Rivera said.
Rivera spent hours and hours moving stems around on the audio canvas and listening to endless possibilities of what the track would sound like. They decided to start with a guitar riff five seconds into the track.
“Where did Texas blues start from? Here in Third Ward Houston, with Lightnin’ Hopkins. We wouldn’t have Stevie Ray Vaughn, we wouldn’t have ZZ Top without Lightnin’ Hopkins,” Chavez said. “We wanted to anchor that and make sure that we are giving a tip of the hat to that musical heritage, so I think that Ray and Ricky did a really great job of basically the intro with the guitar saying, ‘Welcome to Texas’.”
Chavez then described that about 20 seconds into the track, the beat drops out then builds up to Bombón’s chopping technique synonymous with Houston’s DJ Screw on Michael “Buckamore” Arbizu vocal stabs and stadium chanting. Rivera spent hours listening and rearranging different stems but he kept coming back to Bombón signature Screwmbia beats.
“I just automatically started [thinking], ‘How can I infuse the Latin element into this and Houston?’” Rivera described. “I just started rearranging stems and trying to make their sounds wrap around this beat that I had in my mind.”
Go behind the scenes with us as we dive into the creation behind our Sonic ID! 🎥#WeAreHouston #WeAre26 #FIFAWorldCup pic.twitter.com/cOVWot7YcZ
— FIFA World Cup 26 Houston™ (@FWC26Houston) March 6, 2025
Then Rivera had the idea to add their signature Bombón music drop to the FIFA track as a way to “showcase what we really sound like here” in Houston and Texas. As a self-described Texarican (with Puerto Rican parents and raised in Texas), Rivera says the Bombón 1:30 mark “feels like our version of a grito!” which is a yell or shout common in Mexican and Mariachi music.
“We weren’t sure if [FIFA officials] were going to be like, ‘take that off,’ but they left it, and I was like, ‘Yo, we got our drop!’” Rivera said. “The ending was definitely, I just wanted it to be epic. That’s all I remember, with all the chords and strings and the bass, that’s going to be the bow tie on it.”
The final track is 2 minutes and 7 seconds long. “The project marks a milestone in the tournament’s legacy”, with a first-of-its-kind project that “blends global appeal with local flavour through music and sound,” according to FIFA’s website. Fans will hear Bombón perform the track live at the Houston FIFA fan festival and stadium openings and closings in Houston for World Cup festivities next summer. Chavez says the song will also be broadcast in TV commercials; incorporated in marketing, promotional and social media campaigns by FIFA host city partners; and played during award ceremonies and special events leading up to the start of the tournament.
For Chavez, this song is a “love letter to the world” as she continues solidifying the cultural legacy she helped create nearly 25 years ago in Southeast Texas. She says this genre of Screwmbia and the blending of other international sounds heard in the Houston Sonic ID is the culmination of the cultural exchange representative of different walks of life and immigrant descendants that make up Texas.
“I never realized that all that can come together,” Rivera said. “I think just reaching people and pushing our sound, just brings the culture together.”
“Ni de aqui, ni de alla is what we have heard all along. But I like to think that we have changed that, and that we can proudly say that, si somos de aqui y de alla.” Chavez explained.