Grupo Yndio

Grupo Yndio, often shortened to Yndio, formed as a Mexican ensemble devoted to the grupero ranchera idiom. Emerging from Sonora in 1972 after several musicians left Los Pulpos, the sextet quickly gained recognition by reshaping American soft-rock and pop ballads into grupero arrangements filtered through the norteno aesthetic. Their breakthrough arrived in 1973 when a cover of Los Strwck’s “Él” ascended to the top of the Mexican singles chart and stayed there for four weeks; between that moment and 1986 the group cut seven albums for Polygram while placing multiple covers inside the national Top Ten, among them Nazareth’s “Love Hurts,” ELO’s “Telephone Line,” the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody,” Paul Young’s “Everytime You Go,” and Dave Maclean’s “We Said Goodbye.” In 1985 the album Adios reached the upper tier of the Mexican Regional albums survey. After leaving Polygram Mexico the following year the band moved to Philips Colombia, where Dame un Beso and Dime Adiós both attained gold status and further hits followed through the remainder of the decade.

The original six members maintained an unrelenting schedule, performing several hundred concerts annually across Mexico, Central America, South America, and the United States—an estimated 290 dates each year—which left little time for studio work. Activity slowed even further in the 1990s once their major-label contract ended; although offers from numerous independents were available, the musicians elected to release occasional singles, chiefly on Prodisc or Joey International, chiefly to sustain their live commitments rather than to produce full-length projects. In 2007 the lineup contracted to a quintet that nevertheless retained every founding member. Universal’s Fonovisa imprint subsequently acquired the catalog and has issued repeated compilations, live sets, B-sides collections, and rarities anthologies. Ten of the group’s recordings appeared in 2017 on the two-disc Historia Grupera released by International Music Treasure, which also spotlighted Los Caminantes, Los Bondadosos, and Industria del Amor.