8 Voices Shaping Venezuela’s Music

Pedro Elías Corro stands as a vital artery of Venezuelan popular music. Thanks in part to his work, Venezuela can proudly claim an electronic music subgenre of its own. DJ BabaTr and his peers founded a genre that endured state mislabeling, alienation, racism, and classism to the point of near erasure. For years, it was dismissed by Venezuelan elites as “tuki”—a label that helped popularize the genre while simultaneously burdening it with negative connotations. That’s why Baba rejects the term “changa tuki,” preferring instead to call it raptor house.

Baba’s latest release, Root Echoes, captures the genre’s vitality through fast tempos, thumping drums, strident looped synths, and spacious atmospheres. Compiling material from the 2000s alongside new productions, the album reaffirms his influence across generations. Baba is Venezuela’s most valuable homegrown electronic export—an impact highlighted by his collaboration with Arca and his role in opening her Boiler Room set in Caracas.

Panamericana Babylon, El Café Atómico’s 2025 experimental album, unfolds like a delirious road trip across Venezuela, where folklore, anecdotes, and lived experience blur into an unstable myth. Cactus Frank—El Café Atómico’s alternative name—acts as a peculiar narrator, compiling Venezuelan folk legends in which truth, exaggeration, and realismo mágico collapse into a single, continuous hallucination. Laden with subliminal political commentary, the record sketches Venezuela’s sorrows, vices, desires, and fleeting joys through a deliberately polluted sonic landscape of noise, psychedelic pedals, and abrasive mixes. Its excess feels intentional: a mirror of a country saturated with information, trauma, and a lack of historical memory.

One of the album’s most striking moments, “La Mancha Negra,” reimagines a Venezuelan urban mystery—the dark stains that surface on streets and highways—as a near-mythical symbol. They evoke oil and its supernatural, devouring power: a force embedded in Venezuelan culture that consumes everything in its path without conscience. It’s in moments like this that Panamericana Babylon reveals its lineage, as delusion, truth, and mental clutter bleed together into a grotesque archive of a nation haunted by its own myths.

Latine hip-hop would be less prestigious without Lil Supa’s unceasing work over the past two decades. With his 2017 solo debut Serio, he set the tone for the region’s drumless rap explosion. Years later, YEYO marked a pivot toward a rawer, grimier sound that reasserted Venezuelan gangsta rap at a moment when it risked dilution. On ANIMAL — a career-celebrating release — he links up with New York heavyweights like Big Noyd. For years now, Supa has stood as the country’s most commanding voice in the genre.

Tracks like “MIERDA…,” a protest banger driven by a filthy Doktor Rheal beat and a Renny Otolina sample, rank among the sharpest denunciations of Venezuela’s political collapse produced in the last decade. YEYO functioned both as the catalyst for a new grimy rap wave and as a raw portrait of Venezuela’s fallout—nightly tales of robberies, kidnappings, and murder delivered with conviction and maturity—while simultaneously asserting Supa’s position as a leader, innovator, and immaculate curator.

2025 blessed us with great singer-songwriter records: Juana Aguirre’s Anónimo from Argentina and Javiera Electra’s Helíade from Chile. Yet the world still owes closer attention to Rebecca Roger Cruz, a Venezuelan exile now based in France. Working within a chamber folk framework — borrowing from flamenco’s vocal melismas and infused with the colors of Venezuelan tonada and música llanera — Rebecca effortlessly merges her national heritage with her own adventurous artistry on tracks like “Alcaraván” and the ominous title song from her latest LP, Río Abajo. These moments inevitably recall Venezuela’s greatest voices — from the late Tío Simón to Soledad Bravo — and affirm that the true pulse of the Venezuelan singer-songwriter tradition is still alive, evolving, and reinventing itself around the world.

Ruper Vásquez’s 2023 album title, Un Solo de Boca, inevitably recalls that iconic vocal solo by Rubén Blades on Siembra’s “Buscando Guayaba.” Here, Vásquez takes that concept further: in a beatboxer’s fashion, his voice becomes the entire ensemble, sustaining percussion, strings, and some of the most beautiful harmonies you’ll hear in a long time. Rooted in national folk traditions and Afro-Venezuelan music, the album strips sound down to its most elemental form, letting the human voice carry rhythm, melody, and spirit. The result is one of the most authentic and powerful Venezuelan folklore records of the decade—and, sadly, one that deserves far more attention than it has received.

Guatire is a suburb on the outskirts of Caracas, close enough to feel the capital’s pulse, but far enough to be neglected by it. Time moves differently there. You grow up with the sensation that nothing ever quite happens, and that everyone knows everyone. In that suspended landscape, an artist like SAN can either carve something out of the silence or sink into Guatire’s inertia.

His latest LP Anatomía detallada de una herida feels born from that slow, lingering melancholy. It navigates suffering, rage, and incomprehension with the volatility of a heartbroken teenager, while pulling the sonic maneuvers of a veteran producer. On “Voyager,” SAN’s voice contorts, fractures, glitches as if his natural register can’t contain his agony. Over restless drum and bass percussion, his hums build into a bridge that doesn’t quite resolve—it bursts. In Anatomía detallada de una herida, the heartbreak is personal, but the suffocation feels national.

Yajaira La Beyaca’s music takes me back to hearing Venezuelan gangsta rap pioneers Guerrilla Seca as a kid. Though different in genres and angles, they share the same raw appeal: an unapologetic embrace of vulgarity and violence. On “Maria Lionza,” the closing track of her collaborative album CARACTER ANAL with Genosidra, she invokes the Venezuelan spiritism goddess and calls upon the saints for guidance: “Que bajen todos los santos, que me muestren el camino.” A rebellious gesture in a country still shaped by Catholic narratives and rigid moral hierarchies.

What aunts, mothers, and grandmothers once labeled “immoral,” “vulgar,” or “offensive” in Guerrilla Seca’s work, newer listeners now dismiss as “explicit,” “tacky,” or “distasteful” in Yajaira’s music. Yet, Yajaira has chosen to walk her own path—painting vivid, unfiltered portraits of violence, sexual freedom, poverty, and the everyday brutality that shapes her reality.

Few records of this decade encapsulate the emotional drain of the Venezuelan crisis as vividly as amor de encava. The lethargic keys, distorted guitar chords, and heartbroken salsa vocals on “el chiste más largo de la historia” are akin to the haunting melodies of Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew. Loneliness, anxiety, depression, and the psychic weight of being Venezuelan in the 21st century are not just vaguely represented here; they are fully internalized and sonically embodied.

Beneath the cluttered atmospheres and heavily compressed samples lies a profound sadness. This is the sound of dissociation, mental overload, and pain. The way weed420 twists and repurposes salsa romántica feels like a statement of Venezuelan pride.

The story behind amor de encava is inseparable from the story of the Venezuelan diaspora. The geographic fragmentation of Venezuelans bleeds directly into the record’s fractured emotional core: a sound forged in displacement, delineating Venezuelan grief and sorrow as an uncontainable, primitive force demanding recognition.