The Hoodna Afrobeat Orchestra formed in 2012 on the south side of Tel Aviv as both a touring band and its own record label, Hoodna Music. Its musical director from the start has been guitarist Ilan Smilan, who had already spent six years, since 2006, running the reggae and dub band Zvuloon Dub System with his brother Asaf, a project built on the same Ethiopian-music grounding that would define Hoodna. The orchestra grew to 12 to 14 players and took its name from Hoodna Bar, a south Tel Aviv venue owned by the band's own percussionist, Rani Birenbaum, which sponsored the group in its early years. Between 2012 and 2015 the band played every major festival and club circuit in Israel before recording anything, building its reputation as a live act first. Its first release, the self-issued EP No A.C, was taped in a single day, October 3, 2013, at The Zone in Tel Aviv, with drummer Matan Assayag already in the chair; Smilan mixed and mastered it himself.

The debut album, Let Go, followed in 2015 on the band's own Hoodna Music imprint, recorded across three studios between December 2014 and March 2015. It paired originals by Smilan and other members with a cover of Mahmoud Ahmed's "Belomi Benna" and pulled in guests from Tel Aviv's wider groove scene: keyboardist and producer Kutiman took a solo on "Magiq Kiss," and vocalist Karolina sang and wrote its lyrics. The album placed the band inside a documented local movement; Bandcamp Daily's history of the Israeli groove scene later named Hoodna one of its most prominent Afrofunk fusion acts, noting its live shows were sometimes billed as the "Ethiobeat Orchestra" with accompanying dancers.

Over the following years the band's Ethiopian focus sharpened into direct collaboration. Two 2017 singles, "Yelben" backed with "Beza" and "Alem" backed with "Dub Alem," set text by the Ethiopian-Israeli poet and singer Demisu Belete and featured Ethiopian vocalist Tesfaye Negatu and the Adyabo Ensemble. That work fed into Ofel (2019, Agogo Records, Germany), a nine-track album whose lead single, "Ofel I" backed with a horn-and-percussion instrumental arrangement of the Prodigy's "Breathe," was issued in January 2019 ahead of the full record that April. The 2021 EP Alem Alem, self-released, went further, framing all five tracks as instrumental arrangements of songs by classic Ethiopian singers from the golden age of Ethiopian jazz and pop, among them a re-recorded "Belomi Benna."

The band kept working in shorter singles and EPs through 2022 and 2023: "Abarbanel St.," "BFF" (a collaboration with Eddie Roberts, guitarist of the British funk band the New Mastersounds and founder of Color Red Records), the EP Hermitage, and the single "Ben Yehuda." None of the four is in the Discogs database as of this profile; details below come from Spotify and Apple Music listings rather than session-level documentation.

The band's highest-profile release grew out of that steady Ethiopian-repertoire work. Having already recorded with an Ethiopian vocalist, the orchestra set out to work with Ethio-jazz's own founding figure, vibraphonist and arranger Mulatu Astatke, and invited him to Tel Aviv in early 2023. The sessions were recorded March 1 and 2, 2023, at Anova Studios, Tel Aviv, engineered by Uri Vertheim, and produced by Neal Sugarman, saxophonist and co-founder of the Dap-Kings and Daptone Records, working alongside Smilan; Sugarman also plays tenor and alto saxophone on the track "Major." The resulting album, Tension, was released November 8, 2024, on the UK label Batov Records (catalog BTR103), distributed by !K7 Music, and drew the largest community response of any release in the band's catalog on Discogs.

The orchestra describes its own project as studying and investigating the African origins of Western popular music, and its records bear that out as a moving target rather than a fixed style: the early records lean into straight Afrobeat riddims and dancefloor Afro-funk, the middle run of singles and Ofel absorb Ethiopian melody and rhythm directly through collaboration with Ethiopian-born musicians, and Tension folds Mulatu Astatke's own vibraphone-led Ethio-jazz vocabulary into the band's horn-heavy arrangements. Ilan Smilan writes and arranges most of the book and has produced or co-produced every album; his prior decade in Zvuloon Dub System's Ethiopian-reggae fusion gives the band's Ethiopian material a grounding that predates the group itself by six years. The one-off cover of the Prodigy's "Breathe," rearranged as an instrumental horn vehicle on Ofel, is a small but telling sign of how widely the band draws material from outside any single genre. Guest slots across the catalog, from Kutiman and Karolina on Let Go to Neal Sugarman playing alongside the band's own horn section on Tension, place Hoodna inside two overlapping scenes at once: Tel Aviv's home-grown groove underground and the international funk and soul-jazz revival that Daptone-adjacent producers like Sugarman represent.