As Spotify Wrapped arrived in the last moments of 2025, a reality was confirmed that had long been evident across Mexico, Latin America, and the United States: Mexico’s controversial corridos tumbados music genre now consistently outperforms the Anglo-American pop mainstream.

Emerging in northern Mexico in the late 2010s, the genre saw six artists in their 20s flood the charts last year: Fuerza Regida, Peso Pluma, Junior H, Tito Double P, Neton Vega, and the genre’s founder, Natanael Cano. Rewriting regional Mexican music for a global generation, their sound is no longer a viral anomaly, but the commercial and cultural peak of a grassroots movement born on the margins, for years operating entirely outside the major-label system.

The scale of this achievement is historic: it’s the story of a movement that articulates what the Mexican state prefers not to hear. A genre persecuted for both its message and its messengers, whose artists navigate constant death threats alongside unimaginable wealth and fame.

This defiant voice isn’t new. Corridos tumbados is the latest, and most digital, mutation of Mexico’s century-old corrido tradition: a folk genre that has long functioned as a sonic newspaper for the marginalised, narrating stories of revolution, migration, and survival beyond the reach of official histories. Over time, in a country where organized crime controls a third of the national territory, a landmass ten times the size of Great Britain, that tradition was absorbed, distorted, and weaponised by cartel leaders, but its core function remained intact: to document power as it is lived rather than as it is declared.

The “tumbado”, loosely translating to “street-leaning”, marks a shift in approach. In a globalised, platform-driven world, the voice itself became the rupture. When a teenage Natanael Cano began singing corridos through the rhythmic logic of hip-hop and trap, not abandoning guitars and regional melodies, but colliding them with urban beats and digital aesthetics, the genre unlocked a new audience. Musical hybridization became a Trojan Horse: legible to global ears, unmistakably Mexican in origin, and impossible to contain.

Below, we break down ten key songs in the genre’s emergence and rise.

NATANAEL CANO FEAT. BAD BUNNY, “SOY EL DIABLO REMIX” (2019)

As the creator of corridos tumbados, Natanael Cano engineered a radical disruption within regional Mexican music. With a raspy, untrained voice and an instinctive command of the guitar, he became known at just 16 not merely for modernising the corrido, but for weaponising it, composing stark tales of migration, precarity, and survival through drug-dealing, stories Mexico preferred to ignore.

This remix, only his third release, was a collaboration personally requested by Bad Bunny. Upon hearing the original song go viral within niche Latin American music circles, he immediately recognized himself in the story of a young man forced to leave home to provide “everything for my family until the day I die.”

But Bad Bunny also saw something larger: the latent potential of corridos tumbados as a vehicle of cultural soft power. His verse injects a direct, anti-imperialist political charge absent from the original, reframing the song from personal testimony into collective statement: “This is for all my people, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Latino América. America is our home and even if they build the wall higher, we’ll still cross it.”

From the very beginning, corridos tumbados emerged as a fully formed cultural force, musically hybrid, narratively confrontational, and politically impossible to ignore.

JUNIOR H FEAT. NATANAEL CANO, “DISFRUTO LO MALO” (2019)

Junior H’s breakthrough predates that of Natanael Cano, though his sound and worldview are almost diametrically opposed. Melancholic and restrained, Junior H favors a relaxed vocal delivery, less confrontational, more inward-looking. His approach was soon labeled Sad Sierreño, a style whose influence on corridos tumbados is especially audible in its use of requintos and double basses: traditional elements of regional Mexican music slowed down, stretched, and reweighted with a sensibility borrowed from trap.

He became an indispensable figure within corridos tumbados, and as the first artist signed to Rancho Humilde, the label that would go on to structure and amplify the movement, he consistently filters the genre through the somnolent, emotionally dulled atmosphere of his earlier work.

This track marked his first major point of contact with the world Natanael Cano embodies: hedonistic folk narratives of survival and self-advancement, where excess and criminality are framed not as spectacle but as coping mechanisms. “Not just the good, I enjoy the bad, the good memories and the bitter pills” reads less like a lyric than a generational credo, an unvarnished portrait of contemporary Mexican youth: lucid, exhausted, and unapologetically nihilistic. While Junior H explored inner landscapes, the genre was about to explode outward.

PESO PLUMA FEAT. RAUL VEGA, “EL BELICON” (2022)

For a couple of years, corridos tumbados seemed frozen in time, its key figures operating from California, culturally and geographically contained. Everything shifted in 2022 with Rancho Humilde’s distribution deal with Warner Music, catapulting its artists into arenas across the Americas.

Then came Peso Pluma. With a seductive nasal voice and immediate star presence, he became, almost overnight, the most streamed Spanish-language artist in the world, surpassing even Bad Bunny in global streams in 2023. “El Belicón”, his breakout, narrates one of Mexico’s most traumatic modern events: El Culiacanazo.

On October 17 2019, the Mexican state was forced to release Ovidio Guzmán shortly after his capture, following the armed takeover of Culiacán by soldiers of the Sinaloa Cartel, which threatened large-scale civilian bloodshed in this state capital of over three million people.

The song doesn’t just reference this event; it channels its raw logic. “I move fast… I’m in charge here,” he declares, without metaphor or moralising distance. The lyric is the embodiment of a power that proved, in that moment, to be more real and decisive than the state itself. “El Belicón” is not just a hit; it’s an unsettling portal into the moment a nation’s social contract was shredded, repackaged as a viral, danceable beat.

FUERZA REGIDA FEAT. NATANAEL CANO, “CH Y LA PIZZA” (2022)

Everything became more intense when Fuerza Regida entered the stage. With a hypermasculine and openly violent appeal, permeated by an intensely sexualised romanticism, its leader JOP established himself as one of the central figures of the tumbado and, arguably, as its first major sex symbol. Part of that fascination lies in the way his group shifted the genre into a realm where desire and violence shamelessly intertwine.

As the defining project born from the Mexican-American experience, Fuerza Regida forced its way into the mainstream with this corrido of classic structure. The song describes, through deliberately cryptic slang, the position Los Chapitos occupied at the time within the criminal ecosystem, a language intelligible only to those who master the cartel internal vocabulary. More than narrating, the song encodes: it transforms information into a sign of belonging.

References like “Santería that almost nobody wears” allude to the cartel’s necklaces; “In the gabacho, the cheese is cut for CH and the Pizza” situates the generation of capital for La Chapiza in the selling of drugs to the US; “JGL making greens” directly names Joaquín Guzmán Loera; and “I carry the horn” functions as an explicit threat, unambiguously associated with the AK-47 rifle. The violence is not dramatised, it is stated. In that gesture lies its power, and the reason why Fuerza Regida became impossible to ignore. Then came the song that would shatter every remaining barrier.

ESLABON ARMADO FEAT. PESO PLUMA, “ELLA BAILA SOLA” (2023)

This is where the numbers become impossible to ignore: 1.5 billion streams on Spotify, 742 million views on YouTube, and the second most-streamed song of 2023. Ella Baila Sola has been covered by Maneskin and Blur and featured in DJ sets by Björk. It also became the first Spanish-language song to be named “Song of the Year” by Rolling Stone, which acknowledged that “Mexican music has become a cultural phenomenon impossible to ignore.”

The song dismantled barriers long assumed to be immovable for Mexican music: language, class, geography, and emerged as a global pop culture milestone. In the process, it propelled Peso Pluma to the center of the US star system, while simultaneously recasting him as an icon of contemporary Mexican identity.

Today, Peso Pluma headlines festivals like Coachella and Rolling Loud, appears on the covers of *Billboard *and Rolling Stone, and performs regularly on The Tonight Show. He has taken the stage at the MTV VMAs, won the MTV EMA for Best New Artist, and became an ambassador for Yves Saint Laurent. In one of the most revealing moments of his crossover, performing between sets by Sting and Billie Eilish at a Los Angeles wildfire benefit, he reframed music once considered marginal as a central part of California’s rebuilding.

P****ESO PLUMA FEAT. JASIEL NUÑEZ, “ROSA PASTEL” (2023)

“Rosa Pastel” is an introspective and unsettling look into family structures, inherited trauma, and the psychological economy of violence shaped by the cartel system.

Rosa Pastel echoes* The Sons of La Malinche*, a key chapter from The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) by Octavio Paz, where the Mexican is defined as an eternal orphan. Mestizo, born from the violent encounter between two worlds. The Hispanic father who came to rape the Indigenous mother, only to leave her to discover, in her solitude, what her son is. For Paz, Mexican identity is forged through rejection and domination, perpetuating this cycle of abandonment and emotional fracture. In a country marked by chronic paternal absence, whether through migration, incarceration, or death, this dynamic has shaped generations.

Jasiel Nuñez sings: “In my head, always my dad. Greetings to the boss who’s next to God.” The line introduces the song’s emotional axis: the absent father as permanent presence. Peso Pluma follows with: “In my head, what he taught me… still smart, making deals, over in Amsterdam I move it, and we score.” The lesson inherited is not tenderness, but survival. Here, the cartel does more than offer money or power: it offers a filiation, a structure to fill the void left by the vanished father.

NATANAEL CANO, “MÁS ALTAS QUE BAJADAS” (2023)

Historically, the corrido has functioned as a sonic record of survival: a genre suspended between hope and despair, narrating the everyday heroism of those who confront poverty in pursuit of dignity, wealth, or recognition. Its victories are never clean; every ascent carries the weight of what was lost along the way.

Nata Montana, a pivotal album in Natanael Cano’s discography, stands as one of the most complete and widely discussed albums in the corridos tumbados canon. Joyful in essence, the record shifts tone in “Más Altas Que Bajadas”, revealing a rare moment of emotional nakedness. Here, Cano narrates success not as triumph, but as something tinged with melancholy and unease, deeply rooted in Mexican experience.

Moments of ostentation appear almost defensively: “They no longer humiliate me at all; the clothes are no longer borrowed, I bought them.” Escaping poverty allows him to face the world with defiance, yet the song subtly exposes the fragility of that victory. Luxury becomes compensation rather than fulfillment: “I surpassed myself and it came out of nowhere… the diamonds, the designer clothes.” The refrain ultimately circles back to memory and loss, suggesting that upward mobility, in the corrido tradition, rarely resolves the emptiness it seeks to escape.

TITO DOUBLE P, “EL LOKERON” (2024)

For years, a silent but decisive figure in shaping the narrative and sonic universe of corridos tumbados. Before launching his own career as an artist, Tito Double P composed some of the most successful songs for his cousin Peso Pluma, Fuerza Regida, Junior H and Estlabon Armado.

Songs like “PRC”, “AMG”, and “El Gavilán” were fundamental to the genre’s viral spread beyond circles interested in regional Mexican music and narcoculture, imprinting a more direct, less allegorical language with dynamic instrumental foundations that blended traditional instruments with elements closer to the electronic productions typical of the English-speaking world. The delivery of his melodies, faster and less raspy, also solidified the influence of hard rap within the movement.

When Tito Double P finally decided to step up to the microphone, he didn’t inaugurate a new style, but rather claimed authorship of a language that had already proven its effectiveness at the heart of the mainstream. With its overflowing sexual intensity, jumping accordions, screaming trumpets, and sound effects that create a cinematic atmosphere, “El Lokeron” is the best example of this.

FUERZA REGIDA, “MARLBORO ROJO” (2025)

Thanks to 111XPANTIA, “Fuerza Regida” surged in 2025 to become the most streamed musical group of the year globally on Spotify, the first to displace Coldplay since the platform’s inception. The album’s title derives from the Nahuatl word xpantia, meaning “to manifest.” Here, it signals success, wealth, and unrestrained popularity, but also risk and exposure.

That same year, the Sinaloa Cartel entered a phase of violent reconfiguration after the arrest of El Mayo Zambada, turning the state into an active war zone where two major factions started to compete for control. It is within this climate that corrido bélico finds its spotlight: a mutation of corridos tumbados that functions less as narrative than as mobilization, a war march, an adrenaline surge before the gunfire.

“Marlboro Rojo” embodies this shift with an irresistibly seductive poetic charge. “The hard ones are for the impact of bullets; of the devil, I only think of your eyes,” group member JOP sings, momentarily romantic, before delivering one of the song’s dirtiest lines: “the magazines are full, ready to blow their snots off.” The chorus closes by staring death straight on: “And no one knows if we’re getting out of this alive.”

NATANAEL CANO, “CUERNO AZULADO” (UNRELEASED, BANNED IN 2023)

When “Cuerno Azulado” surfaced, it immediately crossed a line. Originally slated to be the lead single from “Nata Montana”, the track was quietly removed from streaming hours after its release without official explanation. Its explicit references to a government alliance with the Sinaloa Cartel triggered widespread speculation about censorship.

A few days later, Mexico’s then president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, addressed corridos tumbados publicly for the first time, describing them as corrosive to society while denying censorship. The ambiguity was the point. No ban was announced, yet distribution became effectively impossible.

Shortly after, state and municipal governments across Baja California, Chihuahua, Aguascalientes, Nayarit, and eventually Mexico City imposed sanctions on the public performance of the genre. For months, Cano refused to perform the song live, at one point stating, “they’re going to kill me” if he did.

Today, the only way to hear “Cuerno Azulado” is through the recording of Natanael Cano’s concert in Mexico City, August 23, 2024. There, Cano shouted “you all voted for Joaquín (El Chapo) in the elections” in front of more than 70,000 people during a performance streamed live on Disney+ (pictured above) and staged with dozens of dancers in cartel-style military vests designed exclusively by Adidas.

That’s modern Mexico: a place where a banned song becomes a mass chant, a family-friendly streaming platform unwittingly hosts a political indictment, and a young artist stares down the state to name the unnameable. It is the logical endpoint of a musical tradition that documents power; a moment in which the document itself becomes an act of power.

Corridos tumbados, then, is the sound of the collapse of the nation-state as the primary narrator of meaning, morality, and cultural identity. In an era where streaming platforms outpace governments, where algorithms move faster than censorship, and where global audiences reward what institutions attempt to suppress, this music reveals a simple truth: culture no longer needs permission to become hegemonic. If Europe feels late to this sound, it’s because the map has already changed.