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 training other than watching Ariel Camacho videos. Much like his idol, Cano writes raw and incisive songs whose rustic quality harkens back to the earliest corridos, a genre for which Cano rapidly became a torchbearer. He first garnered the public’s ear with the viral 2018 hit “El De Los Lentes Gucci”, displaying a knack for DIY promotion that would grant him a sizeable online following. By the next year, at just 18, the Gen Z troubadour earned his first massive hit with “El Drip”. 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 is a modern take on the traditional Mexican genre that’s decidedly more urban, with earnest lyrics about life on the streets. See 2019’s “El de la Codeína”, which substitutes the tropes of narco corridos with those of hip-hop to lend a glitzy allure to the century-old style. Cano’s 2020 single “Arriba” updated those classic ingredients with deep trap beats, a combination he explored further on 2022’s NataKong. A year later on Nata Montana, he channelled Scarface’s iconic anti-hero Tony Montana via both the album title and cover art, yet he set aside the trap motifs in favour of accordion, acoustic guitar and other traditional instrumentation. That put the spotlight firmly on his charismatic vocals, which feel light and breezy even when he’s documenting darker corners of life in Mexico today. Through his music and lyrics alike, the young storyteller continues to cultivate common ground for multiple generations.