Kairo Worship is a Dominican worship trio from Santo Domingo Este: Ariel Holly on bass, who leads the group, Laurelys Castillo on voice, and Natanael Santana on piano. All three were in their twenties when the group broke, and all three come out of the Asamblea de Dios Nueva Jerusalén.

San Luis

The church is in San Luis, the same Santo Domingo Este neighbourhood where Aposento Alto was assembled in 2006. One barrio on the eastern edge of the capital has now produced both the group that defined Dominican Christian rap and the one that took Dominican worship music furthest into the mainstream.

Hermoso Momento

They did not write it. Enmanuel Encarnación did, and the song sat unused for two years before the trio picked it up and cut it acoustically alongside five other tracks. It went out around the middle of 2023.

What happened next was not planned by anyone. Castillo’s verse spread on TikTok, the song went viral on Shazam, and it reached number one among Spotify’s fifty most viral tracks and entered Billboard’s Hot Christian Songs. Holly has described it as something that arrived with great force rather than something they engineered.

A first at the Soberano

At the Premios Soberano in March 2024 the song was nominated for Song of the Year — the first Christian song ever nominated in that category — and for Contemporary Religious Music. What mattered was not that a worship record did well, but that the country’s main awards placed one against the year’s secular hits for the first time.

Farruko

The Puerto Rican reggaetón artist Farruko, who had converted to Christianity, posted a video of himself singing the song. His team then approached the trio, and a remix followed. A Dominican worship group from a neighbourhood church ended up with one of the biggest names in Latin urban music on their record, having done nothing to seek it.

Since

They have performed in Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Costa Rica and El Salvador, and released a debut album in 2024.