Shortly after Rebeca Léon stopped managing Rosalía in 2023, the team behind her Lionfish Entertainment company embarked on a six-month journey to building a boy band from scratch. Inspired by K-Pop’s high-performance dancing, combined with Latin music’s accelerated growth, Léon and her team approached over 500 Latin American boys until she found five that would make up DND, or Do Not Disturb . Early into this process, Léon mentioned these plans to Pharrell Williams , and “to my surprise, he had a similar dream,” Léon tells Variety .
“We had numerous conversations about previous boy bands and there was a clear void for a bilingual, Latin act that we felt confident we could fill. Now we’re working together, across the board on the development of DND. It’s been 18 months.
The boys live together, do vocal training twice a week, but used to [do it] four times a week, in addition to dance rehearsals, media training, social media...
everyone involved in this project is extremely committed.” “Rebeca and I, when we first started talking about this, we both realized, we both were thinking about thinking the same things,” adds Williams, who manages DND with Lionfish Entertainment. Williams also shares producer credits on the quintet of early 20-somethings’ debut EP, “La Primera Vez” (“The First Time”).
“It’s a boy band that makes music for fans who really are into group dynamics and watching chemistry and harmony effortlessly happen,” Willia.