We are in the bowels of one of Mexico City’s largest stadiums. Outside, 65,000 people are chanting the name of , the 25-year-old from Sonora who moves through the backstage area with a euphoria to rival his audience’s. It is his second consecutive show on this stage, the start of his Vol. 1 tour.
“I had a really good time yesterday,” he says shyly, in a room whose adjoining wall thunders with the rehearsals of his trombonists, trumpeters and requinto players: a band of more than a dozen musicians tuning the brass and wood that, minutes from now, will make the stadium shake.
“I never knew what the atmosphere was like outside,” Cano says in a sincere, calm voice, completely unlike the furious tone of his music and the confrontational stance that made him one of the most controversial figures in contemporary Mexico. “Since I could never take my in-ears out, I never heard anybody.”
Two years ago, on 23 August 2024, on this very stage, Cano gave the most controversial and, probably, the most transcendental concert in Mexico’s recent history.
Broadcast live across the Americas on Disney+ and backed by dozens of dancers in military-style tactical vests designed exclusively by Adidas, the show reached its climax when the crowd began to sing along to ‘Cuerno Azulado’ with the intensity of José Guadalupe Posada’s .
Dancing. Drinking. Screaming, as bursts of fire blazed around them and Cano performed this banned song, one he had himself said, weeks earlier on stage in his native Sonora, could cost him his life: “Not that one, because they can kill me.”
A generational anthem that state censorship could not silence.
Its verses describe a government that’s been bought and speak of cocaine trafficked in bulk, alluding to an alleged alliance between the Mexican state and the Sinaloa Cartel, before boasting about the Culiacanazo: 17 October 2019, the day the Sinaloa Cartel took over the city of Culiacán and threatened a civilian massacre, forcing the state to release Ovidio Guzmán, El Chapo’s son, hours after his arrest. In the cartel’s own voice, the song warns the authorities that anyone who lays a hand on ‘El Ratón’, Ovidio’s nickname, will get chaos in return.
The song doesn’t merely recount that moment; it dances through it.
The lyrics end with a call to vote for Joaquín, El Chapo Guzmán, in the elections.
“I like listening to the crowd, every now and then,” he tells me with a lazy smile, holding his hat in one hand. “Towards the end, I started taking them out to try and listen, but they weren’t as fired up as at the start, you know? Maybe, maybe not. We’ll never know.”
In person, there is a pure calm about him. There is also something of the insecurity of a young man who still seems to need validation.
I tell him the crowd sang along to every song, including ‘Cuerno Azulado’, which he played not once but twice that night. This time, with no Disney+ involved and the Adidas tactical gear swapped for jeans and western shirts.
“All right then, I’ll take it,” he replies with a confident laugh, his smile widening so much that the shadows in the room darken the hollows around his eyes. A deep black.
This ever-smiling man reached stardom in mid-2019, when, at just 18, he laid the foundations of a cultural revolution by fusing the attitude, rhythms and production methods of Latin trap with the instrumentation and lyrical tradition of the corrido.
For generations, the corrido had served as a sonic newspaper for those left outside the official history. It had told of revolutions, migrations, murders, escapes, loves and survival. Forbidden stories, told over the euphoric strum of the acoustic guitar. Cano carried them into the language of a generation raised on YouTube, Spotify and social media.
Today he has more than 26 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and corridos tumbados, the genre he founded, have become ubiquitous across Mexico, the southern United States and Latin America. Spotify Wrapped 2025 confirmed that six of the genre’s artists (, #10; , #23; , #27; , #29; , #33; and himself, #40) ranked in the global top 40 of the year’s most-streamed artists. Three times as many as the UK; twice as many as all of Europe.
Cano did not merely achieve an unprecedented sonic evolution; he turned a century-old storytelling tradition into the definitive voice of Mexican Gen Z.
The tradition, however, has mutated from telling of revolutionary heroes into a more urgent and bloodier reality. In a country where organised crime exercises territorial control over areas ten times the size of Great Britain, the lyrics now reflect the everyday life of the cartels: they narrate the lives of the kingpins and the clashes between criminal groups and the authorities.
So, how is it that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of young Mexicans can sing ‘Cuerno Azulado’ by heart?
Minutes after its release, as part of the album ‘Nata Montana’ (2023), the song was pulled from streaming services. The then president, denied any censorship by the federal government, but at the same time criticised the genre’s lyrics. Soon afterwards, state governments and municipalities in Baja California, Chihuahua, Aguascalientes and Nayarit, and eventually Mexico City, began restricting the performance of corridos tumbados.
However it came about, and whoever is behind it, the song’s censorship was immediate, permanent and global. It was also unquestioned.
“There’s no debate there. There are no opinions, nothing. They simply don’t know. They don’t know what’s happening on the streets, with young people, with the music, what’s going on in the lyrics, in the stories behind the songs,” Natanael replies under a layer of resignation, when I ask him about the politicians who want a total ban on corridos tumbados on the grounds that they “promote and celebrate violence”. “They don’t know, and they don’t care to know what’s happening. So there’s nothing to discuss.”
“What would you like them to know, the politicians who want to censor your music?” I ask.
“That we do it from the heart, that’s all. We do it from the heart, sincerely. We believe deeply that we were born for this. And in the end it’s art, in the end it’s music, in the end it’s lyrics. In the end, in the end… there’s no debate.”
The social reflection in this music burns as fiercely as the fire around the stadium, and Cano then closes with the ultimate hypocrisy of cultural consumption, and the double standards of the state and of his music’s critics:
“The violence is in films too, in TV series… right now the number one on Netflix is the film , and then you’ve got … I could talk about stupid stuff, but then there’s no debate, they don’t understand, they don’t know anything. Basically, the more smoke there is, the more I go this way.”
When violence is produced by a transnational studio, it is tolerated. But when it is narrated by the marginalised young people who grew up in the crossfire, the authorities condemn it as glorifying crime.
“They don’t realise, you know what I mean? As long as they’re fucking over other people and not looking at themselves, nothing’s going to happen. So here we are, taking the shit, no big deal,” he adds.
But in Mexico, it isn’t only the government that seeks to control who has the right to sing. Music is also propaganda, and a way of marking territory. It is dangerous to listen to a song dedicated to the Sinaloa Cartel in states controlled by the Tijuana Cartel, to give one example.
The country is consistently ranked the most dangerous in the world in which to make music. According to Freemuse, around a dozen high-profile musicians are killed every year, not counting the dozens more who never make the news. Singers who are suddenly gunned down mid-concert, or whose tortured bodies turn up hanging from a bridge, alongside banners threatening the rest of the artists.
When I ask Cano about the danger of working in this industry, and about the banners hung in Sonora carrying his name beside threats of execution, he activates a defence mechanism he seems to know well: indifference.
“Normal. We don’t have a problem with anybody, thank God,” he says serenely. “I’ve never got involved in anything heavy, never got into trouble. There’s no grudge held against anybody, and I hope none the other way, towards me. And whatever comes out on social media, in the news and all that, that has its purpose too, its message. But everything’s calm, thank God. All good.”
There is no heroism in the answer. No fear either. There is, rather, a way of speaking that seems designed not to say too much. In a country where saying too much costs lives, public evasion is the only possible security policy.
Cano learned about this at the same time as he learned to write songs in his bedroom in Sonora. On YouTube he found the musicians who, before him, had built on the tradition to which he now belongs: icons of music tied to narcoculture, Chalino Sánchez and Ariel Camacho.
“Ariel, Chalino… they’re two different eras,” he explains, his eyes shining with emotion. “You’ve got Chalino over here, you’ve got Ariel over here. I got to be here and see Ariel, and I didn’t get to see so much of Chalino, which my dad did. But from Ariel I take everything, and as for Chalino, I don’t even need to give an opinion: the talent is undeniable, and the music so good.”
‘Both died tragically, violently and before their time, victims of the world they portrayed.
I ask him how he lives with the biographies of his idols, with those stories that could also be warnings.
His smile fades.
“Always present, right? Things happen for a reason. And if you don’t learn, well, you’re fucked. But always watching and learning. But also, that’s no reason to hold yourself back from doing your thing, what you like, what you’re passionate about. But always in mind, right? Just keep going forward.”
In that refusal to hold back, and in the way everyday danger has been absorbed, you can see the imprint of a childhood shaped by hypervigilance. I ask him whether he feels his music is, at bottom, a way of processing the traumatic experiences Mexican youth have accumulated after two decades of the drug war.
His answer is disarmingly honest:
“Of course, of course, of course, it’s normal. But as I say, it’s part of being Mexican, of being from Sonora, of being out on the streets.”
Then he begins to list the small rules of survival he learned as a child:
“Watching your back, sending a car ahead, checking where you’re headed, making sure everybody knows where you are, staying alert… all of that is stuff you end up getting a taste for,” he says.
He lowers his gaze to the floor.
“But that’s how we’ve navigated it all our lives. Normal. It’s part of being Mexican. Proudly Mexican. All good.”
More than 470,000 killings and around 130,000 disappeared. Official government figures on the war against drug trafficking. In his voice lies the memory of a generation trapped between gun battles.
Natanael Cano did not invent Mexico’s fear; he simply gave a melody and a rhythm to the psychological condition of a generation that grew up learning to duck beneath windows.
That is why, on his thirteenth album, ‘Natanael Cano Vol. 1’ (2026), the weight of violence yields to a need for refuge.
The album is dedicated to the land where he was born:
“To the streets of Sonora, to the of Sonora, to the people of Sonora, to those of us who were born, raised and live there. It’s my house, it’s my home. I feel like it hugs me, it’s where I have my family, my people, my brothers, sisters, cousins.”
His purest memories don’t take him back to guns or ostentatious luxury. They take him back to the beach.
“Growing up there is sick, honestly. Especially because we’re forty minutes from the beach. If you’re from Hermosillo, obviously you’d go at the weekend with your family to the waves at San Carlos, at Guaymas. With my family, going to the beach, having a good time, all together, in a hotel, with mum, with dad, with my brother, my cousins.”
That is where the other Natanael Cano appears: not the singer of controversies, nor the young man who sings about guns and cartels, nor the artist that politicians and critics want to turn into a symbol of a culture war.
The son. Recalling how he left Sonora as barely more than a teenager, he evokes his mother.
“An angel, sir. An angel who devoted herself only to us. She had eyes for nothing else. Right now she’s with her own mother, it’s her turn to look after her, like she did with her dad, with my grandad. And she keeps at it, giving it her all, but a really good person, very devoted to her home, so loving.”
Then he laughs.
“I was always a kid back then. I could see my mum had her tastes, and I always told my dad I was going to buy my mum her first car of the year. And I was just a little kid, properly mad.”
That desire to buy his mother a car led him, like so many young people from Sonora, to cross the border.
He was 16.
He explains to me the years in which he began laying the groundwork of the genre at Rancho Humilde’s Los Angeles headquarters, under the visionary business instincts of the producer Jimmy Humilde.
There, alongside his requinto player Danny Félix and the songwriter Dan Sánchez, Cano began singing corridos to the rhythmic logic of hip-hop culture. He did not abandon the guitars or the regional melodies. He crossed them with urban rhythms and a digital aesthetic that soon won over an audience that normally ignored regional Mexican music.
When they released the EP ‘Todo Es Diferente’ (2019), the fusion migrated out of Los Angeles and settled in every city in the world where even a little Spanish is spoken.
The songs of those early years, tales of migration, precarity and survival through drug trafficking, began to rack up hundreds of millions of streams.
Soon afterwards, Bad Bunny collaborated with Cano on ‘Soy El Diablo (Remix)’, and the musical hybrid became a Trojan horse: legible to global ears, unmistakably Mexican and impossible to contain.
Cano no longer needed to go back to California to work.
“I was away for a couple of years, maybe three. But now I’m close to my family. We’re living in the same city. Sometimes I go out to make my music elsewhere, sometimes I make it here. But I love being close to my family and my friends here in Sonora.”
Now that he has racked up luxury cars, dozens of platinum records, friendships with the biggest names in Spanish-language music and historic milestones, what matters most to Cano is finding his father’s eyes in the crowd at the stadium.
“My dad always comes to the concerts. Yesterday I lost him, can you believe it, I couldn’t see him; I was looking for him, but I didn’t spot him.”
But his father was there, unable to take his eyes off him, with the astonishment of a man watching his son become the voice of a country in turmoil.
“I never thought he’d reach this level,” the man said during the previous night’s concert, as his son jumped around in the middle of that stage.
Without guns.
Without cartels.
Without flames.
Without censorship.
Just a father looking for his son from within a crowd, and a son, from the stage, trying to find him.
Outside, 65,000 and the fire that surrounds them wait for Natanael Cano to sing again.