X 100pre

In the first three years of his nascent career, Bad Bunny put out enough singles and did enough guest features to fill out several albums. As an audition for pop superstardom, it’s been impressive. He can adapt to seemingly any style—trap, R&B, reggaeton, bachata, dembow—with a heavy, nasal croon perpetually drenched in Auto-Tune. He became a huge star in 2018, circumventing terrestrial radio and government censorship to become the third-most streamed artist in the world on YouTube. Why does Bad Bunny even need to release an album?

In some ways, X 100pre (a stylization of “por siempre” or “forever”) presents a new Bad Bunny, a bellwether for the new stars of urbano. Like his contemporaries J Balvin and Daddy Yankee, he’s refused to pick a lane or to repress parts of himself that might seem antithetical to an urbano audience historically resistant to deviations from traditional masculinity. He bucks gender norms (wearing cutoff shorts and nail polish) and uses his massive platform to decry domestic violence. With X 100pre, we’re finally able to see all of these sides of Bad Bunny in a singular statement.

Free of bloated posse cuts and seven-minute remixes, X 100pre’s guests are expertly calculated. There’s an absolutely filthy low-slung trap beat from global gentrifier Diplo (“200MPH”), a hook in Spanish from Drake (“Mia”), a hookah-bar anthem with Dominican dembow don El Alfa (“La Romana”), and even a secret cameo from Latin music’s ultimate crossover artist, Ricky Martin (“Caro”). He’s also parted ways with DJ Luian and Hear This Music, who were instrumental in helping him bridge the gap between the reggaeton OGs and the new-school Latin trap artists. DJ Luian may have helped catapult Bad Bunny from the SoundCloud underground to the YouTube mainstream, but he also prevented him from making an album. Upon X100pre’s release, he told Beats 1 he “never had the support” to do an LP. It’s a little crazy to think that, even as we witnessed Bad Bunny’s incredible pre-album run, we were watching an artist who felt like he was being held back.

It’s clear, however, the thrill that comes when he’s left to his own devices. X 100pre reveals an artist both proud of and unafraid to tell the truth about where he comes from. On “Estamos Bien,” he brags about driving his Benz through the potholes in Puerto Rico’s poorly maintained roadways, then takes a nostalgia trip for the perreos of yesteryear on “Cuando Perriabas,” which recalls a “party de marquesinas” that should sound familiar to any boricuas from the island.

And even if his reference to the famous missing persons case of Rolandito Salas Jusino (“RLNDT”) feels a bit self-absorbed—“Y no sé si me raptaron o estoy perdido,” he sings, or, “I don’t know if they kidnapped me or if I’m lost”—those feelings of loss and hopelessness are still likely to resonate with anyone who remembers seeing posters with the young boy’s plastered all over the island. He even dabbles in the political: When he questions the logic of closing schools while new trap houses proliferate on “Ser Bichote,” he’s talking directly to La Junta de Control Fiscal.

Most of X 100pre was produced by reggaeton veteran Marcos “Tainy” Masís and Roberto Rosado and from a production standpoint, it’s nearly flawless—the lone misstep being the ill-advised foray into pop-punk “Tenemos Que Hablar,” which features a stiffly programmed guitar riff that sounds like it was lifted from the Kidz Bop studio session for “Since U Been Gone.” But X 100pre’s high points are numerous, like the two-part, beat-switching jam “La Romana” that expertly marries three genres birthed by Dominicans—bachata, dembow, and Latin trap; or the trap banger/ballad “Caro,” which is at once the hardest and softest track on the record.

Bad Bunny’s perspective is decidedly Puerto Rican, but he’s always drawn musical influence from across the diaspora, from Juan Gabriel’s Mexican boleros and Héctor Lavoe’s salsa to the Colombian (J Balvin) and Puerto Rican (Daddy Yankee) reggaetoneros and trap stars (Ozuna) he’s been collaborating with. And while much has been made of his similarities to Drake’s sad-famous rich-boy aesthetic, it only takes a few seconds of their duet “Mia” to see that the influence flows both ways. The synthesis of this Pan-Latino perspective is difficult to express in any language, yet X 100pre’s masterful sequencing somehow manages to weave a diverse arrangement of styles into a coherent statement, one that represents one of the most honest depictions of urbano music. Because while Latinidad might consist of a collection of distinct and vibrant cultures, they’re in constant conversation—from América Central to del Sur, from the Caribbean to the barrios in the states. X 100pre is what that conversation sounds like.