Nigel Teles­ford

Kes’ first re­lease for Car­ni­val 2025, Co­coa Tea, has topped the US iTunes Reg­gae chart and sev­er­al stream­ing plat­forms, charts and playlists in coun­tries all around the re­gion and the US.

The song was re­leased on No­vem­ber 15 just be­fore the band of broth­ers from south Trinidad em­barked on their third an­nu­al US East Coast Tour. As the tour rocked packed venues in Mon­tre­al, Boston, Philadel­phia; Sil­ver Springs, Mary­land; Nor­folk, Vir­ginia; Raleigh, North Car­oli­na and At­lanta, Geor­gia from No­vem­ber 24 to De­cem­ber 5, the lyric video for the song on the band’s YouTube chan­nel sky­rock­et­ed to 1,000,000 views in the first two weeks as the song got added to thou­sands of stream­ing playlists.

On Sun­day night, In­ef­fa­ble Records Pres­i­dent Adam Gross post­ed an up­date de­tail­ing sta­tis­tics show­ing the song’s main­stream ap­peal and in­ter­est grow­ing rapid­ly in less than a month and with­out an of­fi­cial mu­sic video.

“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!” he said.

“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.”

It was writ­ten by Kees Di­ef­fen­thaller, Tano and Mi­cal Te­ja, with back­ground vo­cals by Tano, Coutain and Ter­ri Lyons.

Gross added: “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 10 streamed songs as well. The song is go­ing vi­ral on Tik Tok 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.”

Giv­ing thanks to the band’s fans and many sup­port­ers af­ter the YouTube video hit 1,000,000 views in just one week, lead singer, Kees Di­ef­fen­thaller re­called a time when Kes was not a house­hold name across the Di­as­po­ra, when the band strug­gled to even get air­play in Trinidad and To­ba­go.

“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!” he said.

The band will cel­e­brate their 20th an­niver­sary at IZWE 2025 sched­uled for Feb­ru­ary 25 at the Queen’s Park Sa­van­nah, Port-of-Spain and re­leased lim­it­ed pre-sale tick­ets on­line on No­vem­ber 18 via their web­sites, kesthe­band.com and izwe­fes­ti­val.com.

Fol­low @ke­sof­fi­cial on Tik­Tok and @kesthe­band­of­fi­cial on In­sta­gram for the lat­est up­dates.