Urbanda is a Dominican merengue típico group founded in 2011 and run from New York. It spent its first decade proving that an accordion band could hold a young audience, and its most recent years proving that the band and its name are two separate things.

The Jorge Lewis years

Jorge Lewis created the group and sang lead. Quién is the record that carried it furthest — it is the one crowds still finish for him when other bandleaders call him up on stage — and Merengues de Cuerdas, Te Lloro and No Lo Beses came out of the same run.

The repertoire was built to reach across generations rather than to stay inside the traditional audience, and it worked: Urbanda became one of the few típico bands of its era that young listeners chose rather than inherited. Julio Swing played the accordion, which in this music is the other lead voice.

The name and the family

The group is a business as well as a band. The name has always belonged to the Benoit family; Chico Mambo Corp. administered the project for years, and Chico Mambo Distribution is the imprint the records went out under.

That arrangement is common in típico and rarely visible from outside — the singer people come to see does not necessarily own the marquee.

The 2025 split

In October 2025 the front line left, abruptly and publicly, and regrouped as El Grupaso, with Jorge Lewis singing and Julio Swing on accordion. Urbanda’s management answered that the name had never belonged to the departing members, appointed Enmanuel Cabrera of Cirujano Management, recovered the social accounts, and said the group would continue from New York.

Its own statement placed the episode in a long line of them, citing Grupo Niche, Adolescentes and several típico bands that had survived the same thing. Dominican music has a great many of these stories — Krisspy among the names whose bands have gone through comparable divisions — and the pattern is consistent: the audience follows the voice, the catalogue follows the name.

The rebuilt group

By April 2026 Urbanda had presented a new front line — the singers Miguel Ángel and Jeremy with the accordionist Raymond — and kept the repertoire that had made it. Both groups now work the same circuit.