Nineteen-year-old rapper and producer Young Cister (aka Esteban Cisterna Alvarez) is from Quilicura, a northern commune of Santiago, and is part of the Chilean capital’s burgeoning trap scene. He’s coming up alongside artists like the Nación Triizy collective and emcee Jamez Manuel, who recently founded label Fiebre41 to promote this new wave of South American trap – including Young Cis – on an intercontinental level.
Young Cister’s “Donde Estás” is an example of how South America’s trap adherents are evolving the genre, taking it into themes that never made it on the mixtapes back in Atlanta. The song’s lyrics are like a script jacked from the second to last conversation you have with your trick ex (the one where you’re still kind of cut up over their gaslighting, as opposed to the final time you talk to them, which is usually a much shorter conversation with way more expletives). The gothic trap beat is a fine base for real-life dead-end feels, even if the genre hasn’t traditionally been that into break-up anthems.
The song follows Young Cister’s 2015 mixtape Cisternasty – but he’s a prolific beatmaker, producing the bulk of his own tracks including this year’s taunting “No Están en Nada.” Though he may be young, that’s par for the course down south – fellow up-and-coming trap artist Pablo Chill E (of Shile Clique) is still in his mid-teens and already hanging out SUV windows in the Santiago hills in his music videos.