Natanael Cano

Natanael Cano is a dark-horse star of traditional Mexican music—a testament to his generation’s ingenuity and resourcefulness. Born in 2001 in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, Cano began making music in his preteen years, with no musical training other than watching Ariel Camacho videos on YouTube, by his own account. Much like his idol, Cano’s music is raw and incisive, with a rustic quality that seems to harken back to the earliest corridos, a genre that Cano rapidly became a torchbearer for. He first garnered the public’s ear with the viral hit “El De Los Lentes Gucci” (2018), which made him an overnight sensation on YouTube and marked a tendency toward DIY promotion that would grant him a sizeable following online. By the next year, at just 18 years old, the Gen Z troubadour had his first chart-topper under his belt with “El Drip” (2019). The first Mexican artist to be featured on Apple Music’s Up Next series, Cano has since rapidly ascended the ranks of Latin music, thanks in part to the sound he pioneered, corridos tumbados, a sort of modern-day take on the traditional Mexican genre that is decidedly more urban, with earnest lyrics about life on the streets. Such is the case with songs like “El de la Codeína” (2019), which substitute the tropes of narco corridos with those of hip-hop, lending a glitzy allure to a century-old style for the Zoomer generation.