B-Real on Cypress Hill’s First Original Spanish-Language Album: “We Wanted to Challenge Ourselves”

For Cypress Hill, making Dios Bendiga, the band’s first album of original songs written entirely in Spanish, meant returning to an idea that had been on the shelf for decades. After all, long before Latin American rap became the global force it is today, B-Real, Sen Dog, and Eric Bobo were proving that it could exist in the first place. Nowadays, when Latin American rap stars such as Argentina’s Trueno refer to the group as “the translators of rap,” they aren’t simply paying tribute. They’re describing what Cypress Hill meant for an entire generation of MCs who first heard hip-hop reflected in a language and identity that felt like their own. That reputation didn’t emerge overnight. Early songs like “Latin Lingo” and “Tres Equis” hinted at the group’s bilingual identity, but it was 1999’s Los Grandes Éxitos en Español, a collection of Spanish-language reinterpretations of the band’s by-then classic songs, that cemented their influence across the region. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks Cypress Hill has anything left to prove to its Latin American fans in 2026. Yet Dios Bendiga finds them taking one of the boldest risks in their career, a testament to the band’s creat...