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John Mitchel 1

THE STREETS LEADING up to the Lab Studios, a recording complex in Miami’s lush Coconut Grove neighborhood, are full of bright, iridescent peacocks. Peso Pluma has set up a weeklong writing camp here in late January to work on his new album, which, he reveals later, is called Éxodo and will be out this summer. It’s almost too fitting that a bunch of decadent birds with stately, metallic feathers are sashaying down the pavement. After all, the Mexican artist, whose real name is Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija, has blasted to global stardom by writing about things like heartbreak and romance — but his swaggering, streetwise songs about high-luxe, extravagant living are among his most popular. Today, he’s about to make a few more.

Through the doors, the studio feels like a tropical frat house, packed with polite, laid-back guys who might pass for regular twentysomethings, except that many of them are casually wearing diamond-dripped watches and gold chains heavy enough to cause neck injuries. Most are Peso’s bandmates — young but seasoned musicians who play bass, double bass, guitar, requinto (a smaller kind of guitar), trombone, and charchetas (alto horns), all instruments that define Peso’s particular brand of corridos tumbados.

Corridos tumbados are a strikingly modern version of corridos, folksy, narrative-driven ballads that have told some of Mexico’s most epic stories and reflected complex realities for more than 200 years. Traditional corridos — which play a big role in música mexicana, an umbrella term used to describe the many different genres within Mexican music — are often seen as old-school, honky-tonk soundtracks for grandparents. That changed in a big way around the mid-2010s, when a bunch of kids, including the then-17-year-old Natanael Cano, brought out their sharpest, prickliest guitars and started borrowing influences from trap and other forms of hip-hop. The result shaped the music for a hyper-online, genre-agnostic generation.

Peso followed shortly, and shot out of the pack, a skinny kid whose stage name literally means “featherweight.” Over the past few years, he’s added his own energetic style to the movement: His songs have emphasized chunky trombone lines and intricate guitar arrangements that set the stage for his spiky vocals — though he quickly showed he could go beyond this sound and slide into any style of music, from pop to reggaeton.

 

Right now, at the Lab Studios, his band is crowded into one of the recording rooms, listening to an early version of what could become his latest hit. Peso isn’t there as a maelstrom of opening brass notes charge out of the sound system. But within a few minutes, an unmistakable rasp, full of grain and grist, calls out “Hola!” It’s more of an announcement than a greeting, unique and barbed enough to tear a hole in the space-time continuum. Peso bounces in cheerfully, wearing a white T-shirt and blue basketball shorts, a black backward cap covering his signature mullet. He eyes his producer’s computer and nods along to the track for a bit. Then, in a flash, he’s gone.

For the next few hours, Peso bobs around like a ball of electricity, bursting into different rooms and jumping onto different songs. When I find him a little while later, he’s thrashing away on a guitar, demonstrating an idea to some of the best songwriters in all of música mexicana. There’s Edgar Barrera, the 33-year-old producer and songwriter who was nominated for 22 Latin Grammys in the past two years alone. Nearby is Alexis “El Chachito” Fierro, a witty, jovial writer who helped Peso with “Lady Gaga,” a supersmash he recorded with Mexican newcomers Gabito Ballesteros and Junior H, full of lyrics about champagne-topped excesses.

Peso has finished most of a corrido that he wrote on his own, but he wants to develop it a little more. “Maybe we can add a pre-chorus or something,” he suggests, fiddling with the guitar. He sings what he has so far, and his voice, in all of its rich peculiarity, fills the space. His tone is so unvarnished and raw, it can be either grating or captivating, depending on the listener. Overwhelmingly, people are drawn to it. “It doesn’t sound like any other voice in the industry,” Barrera says. “When you hear him, you know immediately that it’s Peso Pluma singing.”

That voice was everywhere last year. In March, he joined forces with the Mexican American band Eslabon Armado for “Ella Baila Sola,” a googly-eyed ode to a pretty girl on the dance floor that became the first música mexicana song to reach Number One on Spotify’s Global chart and to crack the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 (Rolling Stone named it the best song of 2023). At one point on the track, Peso bleats out “Bella!” with such force that it spawned TikTok challenges and tons of impersonations. Next was “Bzrp Music Sessions Vol. 55,” part of a popular YouTube freestyle-type series, which scored Peso a second Number One on Spotify’s Global chart. Then Génesis, his breakthrough album, debuted at Number Three on the Billboard 200 in April — the highest-charting regional Mexican album ever.

 

A bunch of wild milestones followed: In September 2023, Peso and his bandmates became the first música mexicana act to perform at the VMAs. He beat out Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, and everybody else in the world to become the year’s most-viewed artist on YouTube. He ducked in and out of studios with some of his rap heroes — A$AP Rocky and Travis Scott, among them. And then, in February, he won his first Grammy, taking home a trophy for Best Música Mexicana Album, capping the night with a couple of photos alongside Jay-Z. In between, there have been billions of streams, collaborations with everyone from Becky G to Anitta to Kali Uchis, and sold-out stadiums across the whole of the planet.

Part of the appeal is that, unlike many música mexicana artists of the past, Peso traded cowboy boots and sombreros for high-end sneakers and baseball caps, looking more like an iced-out rapper than a Mexican crooner. Add an idiosyncratic Eighties-style mullet, one so distinct that kids in Mexico have started asking for the Peso Pluma haircut, and you have the most daring ambassador of corridos tumbados, rewriting the genre’s rules. “I’m proud to wave my flag up high and to be the first to do a lot of things — to be able to show my roots and where we’re from and what we like to listen to and what we do,” Peso says.

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