The Rise of TRUENO
Trueno isn’t just making music; he’s carrying a whole barrio’s pulse from La Boca to the world. He grew up on a hip-hop fandom, flipping the script from underground freestyling to stadium stages, all while keeping it real and unapologetic. He’s proof that you don’t need a made-for-TV image to be iconic—just raw hustle, dope wordplay, and a vibe that says: I’m here, I’m heard, I’m the flow of Argentina.
FEATURE INTERVIEW:
The new star of global hip-hop is 24 years old, speaks Spanish, and is from Argentina. His name is TRUENO. The rapper from La Boca — a working-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires — released his fourth studio album, “TURR4ZO“, on April 24, and in it he does something that is core to the genre’s DNA, yet few MCs of his generation dare to execute: sampling the history of an entire country to tell his own.
On this record, the two-time Latin GRAMMY® winner becomes a historian of Argentina’s musical legacy, paying tribute to legends across genres ranging from tango and rock to cumbia villera — the soundtrack of Argentina’s working-class neighborhoods — and uses hip-hop as a linguistic bridge to turn his turro identity — that of young people from Argentina’s barrios — into a worldwide cultural currency.
Fresh off his late night debut on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, we spoke to the rapper, “It’s very important to me because I feel like that’s also how music lives on; whether through a sample or a feature, you go back to the past, ” TRUENO tells Galore, while sipping mate — Argentina’s most iconic social ritual — as he describes what is, in essence, the album’s DNA.
To pull this off, TRUENO and his longtime collaborator Tatool needed someone who could dig as deeply as they do. They found that in El Guincho, the Spanish producer behind artists such as Rosalía, BTS, Charlie xcx, and FKA twigs. Together, the trio didn’t just sample: they wove each reference into the story TRUENO tells across all 14 tracks.
“El Guincho, to me, is the king of samples, ” TRUENO reveals. “Tatool and I were blown away by his approach to sampling — not in a traditional or basic way, but going deeper and proposing something new.”
When El Guincho joined the project, he embarked on an exercise similar to what TRUENO’s 15.5 million monthly Spotify listeners experience upon encountering the LP: immersing themselves in Argentina’s history, not just its musical legacy, to truly understand the MC’s vision and message.
TURR4ZO opens with a sense of melancholy through the sample of “Fácil de Olvidar” by Argentine icon Sandro, on the track “CON EL COMBO,” transforming the melodies of that late-1960s ballad into a commanding track that proclaims its own impact.
“[We took] a masterpiece by Sandro — super native, super pure — and turned it into straight raw hip-hop, with bass, kick drum, snare, something very hard. [Inspired by the song’s title], the line came to me naturally: ‘Mami, soy difícil de olvidar, ’ [translating into English to ‘Baby, I’m not easy to forget. ’] The inspiration behind some of the tracks is a little ambiguous: the sample comes first, and I take the sample as a concept and run with it,” the artist explains.
To achieve this collective exercise, TRUENO, Tatool and El Guincho sampled 20 emblematic songs part of Argentina’s cultural heritage: from “Tírate un paso” by Los Wachiturros in “TURRAZO” — a song that the rapper grew up listening to — to timeless classics from rock legends as Gustavo Cerati, Luis Alberto Spinetta and Andres Calamaro, to tango essentials by Astor Piazzolla, among others: voices that not only are quintessential to Argentine culture, but serve as a bridge connecting past, present and future.
More than simply drawing on reference tracks, what TRUENO achieved on this album goes beyond a masterclass in music history: it is a recognition of and tribute to all the voices that carried him to becoming a global hip-hop phenomenon, a message to young people who find inspiration in his path, a reminder not to forget your reference points, and a way to make Argentina a language that the global hip-hop world can understand and inhabit.
“The idea was to pay homage to everything that, even in the smallest way, influenced me in my life or made a contribution to Argentine music, ” he says. “Everything that lives on this album, everything I want to represent, is very important because there’s so much energy behind it. So many artists and so many moments live within it. For me, it’s like giving people a déjà vu — making them remember and feel grateful toward people from other generations for everything they created.”
In the midst of this historical quest, the most vulnerable moment of “TURR4ZO” isn’t specifically about Argentina — it’s about his parents, Uruguayan rapper Pedro Peligro and singer Juliana Corazzina. In keeping with tradition, TRUENO delivers a new edition of his “RAIN” saga — a song that connects all his LPs — in which he undresses to his most vulnerable state, letting go of his artistic persona to speak to the audience as Mateo, the human.
On “RAIN IV,” the MC turns outward to pay a heartfelt tribute to his parents, weaving in four songs that continue to build this intergenerational connection: “Caminito” by Carlos Gardel (1926) and “Puro Talento” by Miranda! (2011), “lo_divino” (2025), and “los ausentes” (2024) by Juana Aguirre.
“I wrote it without realizing it was going to be a ‘RAIN,” TRUENO says of the track. Musically, the recording is contained between two contrasting emotions: struggle and peace — an artistic choice the MC uses to represent precisely what he learned from each of his parents.
“My dad taught me to be a man — to walk through things that hurt, to get through hard moments, to find myself from a very young age. My mom was always the more rational, more tender side of me. She was the peace in my life. That’s why this feels like the most beautiful ‘RAIN’ of all — because it’s not about me, but about the two of them, the ones who shaped me,” he explains.
The values TRUENO inherited from them — respect for legacy and reverence for those who paved the way — led him to seek out two living legends of Argentine rock: Andrés Calamaro and Pity Álvarez.
As TRUENO recalls, he met Calamaro at an airport in 2022 and told him, “You’re a beast. ” To the MC’s surprise, the legendary rock star already knew his music well — he had watched several of his freestyle battle competitions on YouTube. “He named two specific battles, and you realize how inside the music this guy really is, how attuned he is to what’s happening out there. They’re not closed off at all.”
A piano instrumental in the same key as Los Abuelos de la Nada’s classic “Mil Horas”— the band Calamaro was a member of during one of its lineups — became a catalyst for this song, in which TRUENO crafts something like a response to the story told in the 1983 original.
“I put myself in Calamaro’s shoes — standing in the rain, waiting [as the chorus goes] and being left behind. I started writing as if I were part of the original version of ‘Mil Horas,’ with all the respect in the world,” he recalls.
What followed was the formal presentation of this tribute to the singer who originally wrote and first performed the record over four decades ago.“ He loved the more hip-hop version,” says TRUENO.“For me, it was a way of paying homage to the song in a rap way, making him genuinely love it and get completely into it — that meant everything to me.”
The choice took on even deeper meaning when TRUENO discovered that the first artists to win a Latin GRAMMY® for Best Rap/Hip-Hop Album were Sindicato Argentino de Hip Hop — and they did it with an album (Un Paso a la Eternidad) that also sampled “Mil Horas.”
Then comes “PITY IN THE SKY,” Pity Álvarez’s track, which breaks with the album’s emotional tension entirely — and with the nature of its other collaborations. The song is almost entirely a deep, intimate message, delivered like a voice note from a private moment, in which the legendary artist confronts existentialism and both sides of fame: the sweetness of success and the corrosive pull of the fall from grace.
“This was meant to be the intro to the real closing track — which we don’t know if it’ll ever come out — called ‘TOCANDO EL CIELO,” TRUENO reveals. “I feel like he underwent such a powerful catharsis — what it means to touch the sky, for him, for us, for everyone — that the producers and I just said: this is ‘TOCANDO EL CIELO. ’ We scrapped the original track and kept ‘PITY IN THE SKY,’ because it’s better than the song that was supposed to follow it.”
It’s impossible not to be moved by Pity’s verses and the words he dedicates to the artist — something TRUENO himself holds close: “The fact that he came out of retirement and composed something like this for my album feels like an enormous act of generosity. I’m deeply grateful to him for the respect he has shown and continues to show me. For me, this is the most important feature of my career.”
This dialogue between past and future wouldn’t be complete without the current generation’s voice on the album. To that end, TRUENO invited artists including Neo Pistea on “GRILLZ,” Milo J on “PUMAS,” and the only woman on the entire record, María Becerra, on “90s.”
“PUMAS” is built to connect with the experience of living abroad — a vision TRUENO arrived at during his global conquest: “I felt like [Argentine founding father José de] San Martín riding on horseback to plant the flag in every place I had to perform. It happens to everyone — it’s beautiful to see the world, but every country you visit makes you fall more in love with your own.”
To accompany him on this quest, he tapped in rapper Milo J, who is beginning to captivate audiences outside of Argentina at the same age TRUENO had his own international breakthrough: 19.
With Becerra — affectionately nicknamed La Nena de Argentina by her fans — TRUENO captured an era that deeply shaped both of them during their adolescence, and a decade that was essential in building the turro identity TRUENO speaks to throughout the album: the “90s.”
“María Becerra is the most turra of all, ” he says with a laugh. “She has the full attitude and also represents the girls from the barrio. And she made it. I feel very represented by her. I admire her so much as an artist. Conceptually, she’s very turra, very of the neighborhood — like me — and she represents the same thing.”
What he sees in both Milo J and María Becerra is just a reflection of who he is: the same barrio roots, the same hustle, the same codes. Since breaking through in 2022 with his sophomore album BIEN O MAL, TRUENO has taken his turro identity from La Boca to stages worldwide — including a run with Gorillaz in the UK this spring and his US late-night debut at Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show. With “TURR4ZO“, he made Argentina impossible to ignore.
TEAM CREDITS:
Editor-in-Chief: Prince Chenoa
Feature Editor: Taylor Winter Wilson (@taylorwinter)
Writer: Marysabel Huston (@marysabelhuston)
Photographer: Agustin M. Gomez (@agustinmgomez)
Cover Art Design: Carlos Graciano (@sadpapi666)
Videographer: Cata Wakstein (@catawakstein)
Wardrobe Stylist: SunRa.Creative (@sunra.creative) , Sol Canievsky (@solcanievsky)
Public Relations: IMAGINE IT MEDIA (@imagineitmedia)
