NAHUEL

Buenos Aires, Argentina · b. 2002 · FARA Records

NAHUEL (Nahuel Aguirre, b. 17 May 2002) is from Buenos Aires — a huge, grand, European-looking city at the wrong end of the continent, with Beaux-Arts façades, wide avenues and no tropics anywhere near it, and, over the last decade, one of the most important urbano capitals on earth. He is part of the generation that made that true: freestyle plazas, bedroom sessions, a country that decided it was going to be a reggaetón and trap superpower five thousand kilometres from where the music was born, and then simply became one. What got him was the dembow, and the discovery that a rhythm can be an argument.

A confident, melodic lead that never pushes. The verses are low, close, rhythmic and cool — controlled to the point of coldness — and the chorus opens into something huge and immediately chantable. He does not oversing. Sensual, but held: the restraint is the seduction. The riddim is dembow front and centre at 95 BPM in F♯ minor, with a tight kick, bright snare, clean sub-bass, dark glossy synths and a neon-tropical atmosphere — manufactured heat, in a city that has no business being warm. He is a craftsman about it, obsessed with pocket and with what you take out.

Cool, low and completely unbothered. He doesn't chase and he doesn't perform want; he states it, which is far more effective. And he is honest in a way the genre rarely is — on his own record he admits he lied, that he swore he would stop and didn't, and that she is doing exactly the same thing. He doesn't present himself as a conqueror but as an equal participant in something neither of them is going to stop. Controlled, magnetic, honest.