There’s a specific kind of silence that follows you when you leave home.

It’s not loud.
It doesn’t demand attention.
But it shows up in small moments — in the smell of coffee that isn’t quite right, in winters that feel endless, in the way no street ever sounds like the one you grew up on.

“Between Here and There” was created inside that silence.

This album wasn’t written to chase trends.
It wasn’t built for playlists or algorithms.

It was written because something needed to be said —
something that people like us feel every day but rarely hear expressed the right way.

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Why We Made This Album

MetalRican has always been about identity.

Not the easy version.
Not the surface-level version.

The real one — the complicated one.

The one that exists when you’re Puerto Rican… but not on the island.
When you carry your culture in your blood, but your surroundings don’t reflect it.
When your memories are louder than your present.

This album is about that exact space:

Living between where you are… and where your soul still belongs.

We chose English-language salsa on purpose.

Because that’s what diaspora feels like.

It’s not fully Spanish.
It’s not fully American.
It’s something in between —
just like us.

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Why Salsa — But In English?

Salsa is home.

The percussion, the piano, the movement — it’s embedded in who we are.
But for many of us in the diaspora, our thoughts don’t always come out in Spanish anymore.

And that creates a disconnect.

So instead of forcing one side or the other, we embraced both.

English lyrics. Puerto Rican rhythm.

Not as a gimmick.
Not as fusion for the sake of fusion.

But as a reflection of reality.

This is how we speak now.
This is how we feel now.

And no one was really making music that sounded like that —
so we did.