Prince Royce, born Geoffrey Royce Rojas de León, is a Dominican-American bachata singer and songwriter. He took the most Dominican of guitar musics, sang it in two languages to an audience raised on American radio, and turned it into one of the largest careers the genre has produced.

The Bronx

He was born in the Bronx in 1989 to Dominican parents and grew up between two languages, which is the ordinary condition of his generation in New York and turns out to be the whole explanation of his music.

He started writing poetry at thirteen and songs at sixteen, and took the name Prince Royce then. At eighteen he sang on a Spanish-language variety show. He worked in a mobile phone shop to pay for musicians and studio time, which is the part of the story he tells most often and the part that explains the discipline.

At nineteen a manager heard a demo and pushed him toward bachata specifically — he had not necessarily arrived there on his own — and introduced him to a producer with a label. The intervention was decisive: a Bronx teenager writing bilingual songs could have gone in several directions, and this one turned him toward his parents’ music.

Stand By Me

His first album came out in 2010 and led with a bachata version of Ben E. King’s Stand By Me, sung half in English and half in Spanish. It went to number one on the tropical chart, and Corazón Sin Cara did the same.

The single established the method he has worked with ever since: take a song the hemisphere already knows in English, set it over a bachata guitar, sing it in both languages, and give two audiences something that belongs to each of them. Little of what he has recorded since departs from it.

It also made him the most audible answer to a question the genre had been asking for years — whether bachata could leave the barrio without stopping being bachata. He is one of the names that closes the distance between the founding generation and the present, and Antony Santos’s own record shows the same crossing from the other side.

The albums

Phase II followed in 2012, went platinum and was nominated for the tropical Latin Grammy. Soy El Mismo came in 2013 with Darte Un Beso, which topped the Hot Latin Songs chart. Double Vision, in 2015, was his English-language album and produced Back It Up with Jennifer Lopez and Pitbull.

Five arrived in 2017 with a guest list that reads like a map of where Latin music had got to — Shakira, Chris Brown, Zendaya, Farruko, Gente de Zona, Arturo Sandoval — and it was his fourth number one. Then a long run of collaborations across genres, and Alter Ego in 2020, a double record split into two halves with different names.

Llamada Perdida, in 2024, is the outlier: a heartbreak album, personal and unornamented, made by someone who had spent fifteen years making records for stadiums. He has also shared a Dominican stage with Esme, which is what the older names in this genre do for the younger ones.

Eterno

His eighth album came out in May 2025 and is the idea from Stand By Me carried to its conclusion. Thirteen English-language pop standards — the Beatles, the Bee Gees, Elvis, the Backstreet Boys, Richard Marx — rebuilt as bilingual bachata. Yesterday. How Deep Is Your Love. I Want It That Way.

A record like that could be a novelty and is not, because he has been doing exactly this since he was twenty-one and because the arrangements take the songs seriously. What it argues is that bachata is not a regional flavour you apply to foreign material but a form capable of holding anything you put in it.

He tours with Romeo Santos now, the two largest names the genre has produced, and Miami-Dade has a day named after him. The kid cleaning display cases in a phone shop was the same person planning all of it.