Skip to content

The sound of Carnival

What is soca music?

From the fete to the road, soca is the music everybody moves to. Here is where it came from, the styles you will hear, and the artists worth knowing before you land.
Meet the artistsRoad March winners

Image credit: Grueslayer, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

What is soca?

Every Carnival has a soundtrack, and in Trinidad that soundtrack has a long family tree. The soca blasting from a music truck on Carnival Tuesday is the grandchild of songs sung in French Creole around stick-fighting rings in the 1800s.

The high-energy dance music of Carnival, created in the early 1970s by Lord Shorty, who blended calypso with Indian rhythms and instruments such as the dholak and dhantal. Today soca is the soundtrack of fetes, wining and mas.

Lord Shorty described his new style as the 'soul of calypso'. A journalist's spelling of the name, 'soca', is the one that stuck.

Drawn from our history of soca and the Trini Dictionary entry for soca, where you will find the sources.

Calypso Rose performing on an outdoor festival stage in 2016, wearing a blue top and a blue sequinned jacket, microphone in hand and smiling as she dances.From Calypso to Soca: The Sound of Trinidad Carnival8 min readRead the full story

Four flavours you will hear

Soca is not one tempo. A good DJ moves between styles all night, so it helps to know what you are hearing.

Press play

Videos load from YouTube only when you press play, so the page stays light on your data.

Bunji Garlin, soca, ragga soca

Kes the Band, soca, groovy soca

Machel Montano, soca, power soca

Artists to know

The voices behind the fete anthems and Road March contenders. Each profile has a short bio, where to listen and any titles in our results data.

Where to listen

Build your playlist before the flight. These links open each artist's page on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube.

Recent Road March winners

  1. 2026Machel MontanoSong: "Encore" (171 plays). A record 12th Road March title.
  2. 2025Machel MontanoSong: "Pardy" (267 plays). His 11th Road March, equalling Lord Kitchener's record at the time.
  3. 2024Mical TejaSong: "DNA".
  4. 2023Bunji GarlinSong: "Hard Fete".
  5. 2020Iwer George and KesSong: "Stage Gone Bad".

What is the Road March?

The song played most often as bands pass the judging points on Carnival Monday and Tuesday. Its singer wins the Road March title, one of the most prized honours in soca.

From the Trini Dictionary.

Full Road March history

Talk the talk

Music words you will hear in the fete, the tent and the panyard.