Exploring Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso and the continued rise of Latin pop
From emerging out of Argentina’s first urban music wave to opening for Kendrick Lamar and performing at Coachella, experimental hip-hop and trap-pop duo Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso have been making major moves. Their newest album shows just how far the pair have come since their early days making online comedy skits.
Although they almost have the same name, Catriel Guerreiro and Ulises Guerriero are not related. Their connection was established at six years old in Buenos Aires, and they started playing around with music a decade later in 2010. They swiftly took the Argentine scene by storm, collaborating with famed Latin hip-hop producer Bizarrap as well as other local artists, until their debut album launched them into an unexpected torpedo of fame.
After releasing their EP Baño Maria in 2024, they were invited to host the Tiny Desk concert that became the fourth most-watched episode in the series’ history. “I think what people loved is that it was spontaneous and natural,” Paco told the Financial Times. “It’s like if you watched us during a rehearsal”. The mammoth response prompted an immediate album and a definite burnout, and the duo abruptly delayed a scheduled world tour to go to therapy.
The internet was soon privy to an announcement video disclosing a therapy course run by Sting. This move was an example of their many shape-shifting marketing strategies to bring attention to the randomness of their music, and the curtains match the drapes. The band have quite the reputation for playfully switching between genres in a single song, as well as adopting different ‘characters’ and voices as if a track had more than just two vocalists on it.
Their latest album embodies their chameleonic notoriety, starting from an album cover that shows both members of the band in different character wear. What comes after is a shuffle of genres from electronic dance to Arabic beats, with the collaboration of the most bombastic lineup an up-and-coming group can hope for.
Free Spirits goes from Fred Again and Anderson .Paak, with whom they can be seen sharing a bath in ‘Ay Ay Ay’s’ music video, to none other than the schooler of rock, Jack Black, to bringing in their former guru, Sting. Combining Spanish and English so sporadically while genre-shifting so chaotically made for a majestic experiment, but the idea that a Latin American act should attract names so prominent to collaborate on their album is truly ground-breaking progress.
From Bad Bunny making history as the first Spanish-speaking performance at the Super Bowl halftime show to Rosalía being the first non-English singing performer to earn a Brit award, it seems that the dominance of English in music is gradually starting to take a backseat.
A report released last week by Spotify illustrates this shift, as songs in 16 languages reached Spotify’s Global top 50 in 2025, with Spanish, Turkish, Arabic, Korean, Portuguese and Indonesian tracks bringing in the figure to double what they had been in 2020. Bad Bunny was the most-streamed artist in the world, and Brazilian Funk was the streaming platform’s fastest-growing genre.
Music is evolving out of its hegemonic framework, and listeners are hungry to hear all 14 of the dialects Rosalía is singing in, showing that the demand is there, and artists like Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso suddenly don’t have a hard time convincing an actor to sing on a record, as the duo told the Financial Times, “Being Latin is fashionable right now”.
