The Pop Corporation

It’s pretty unassuming to have two plastic lawn chairs, sat empty for the cover of your newest LP, but Bad Bunny’s ‘DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS’ isn’t just any album – he has made a career best, just as latin, reggaeton flavoured global pop felt like it may have been on the cusp of waning.

The Puerto Rican performer has been around a while now, releasing five studio LPs in six years. Prolific and wildly popular for sure, but Benito is a little older now and he’s got more to say – he’s doing it for his culture, in what feels like a hugely poignant statement, in a significant moment in history.

The artwork? Something to resonate with Puerto Ricans, and not the likes of us looking in. The visualisers on YouTube, featuring words from a professor by the name of Jorell Meléndez Badillo, dissecting Spanish colonisation and The States ‘acquiring’ the Island and so much more.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves and dismiss this as a tediously weighty body of songs that forget to be fun, catchy, and the rest, in favour of being far too worthy – not in the slightest – this is a buoyant, party album with hooks, buckets of charm and infectious production. It just feels different this time around – like he’s got an instant classic on his hands.

While música urbana has been influencing the whole of pop music for the best part of a decade, there was a niggling feeling that it couldn’t continue – American and European producers were looking more toward house music for their cues – and while Bad Bunny doesn’t exactly turn his back on the sound that made him so dizzyingly popular, now, he’s given it a shot of gravitas.

On this new album, he’s never sounded so certain of himself, and the results feel like a whole new phenomena waiting to happen, lighting a fuse to see who else south of North America has something to say.

Partly, Benito’s concerns revolve around the commodification of latin culture, and maybe he’s spotted his part in that, allowing him to look at what Puerto Rican and Central American culture is, what it means to himself and his community. You may have imagined him coming back with a raft of big name features and shoe-horned hooks from Grammy winners – we may have been relatively happy with that – after all, he’s always guaranteed a couple of club hits regardless.

However, he’s now working with his platform to say more, and while not sidestepping his career to date, he’s seemingly made something for himself, for people like him, and this deeper connection to his roots has resulted in what feels like an early contender for album of 2025, no joke.

All this, timed with Trump’s inauguration, the loss of the Puerto Rico Independence Party in the ’24 election, and Bad Bunny has gone from popstar to fully fledged artist.

From the off, should anyone need convincing, Bunny kicks off with perhaps the finest piece of music he’s created to date – ‘NUEVAYoL’ is the past, present, and future, incorporating El Gran Combo’s ‘Un Verano en Nueva York’ from ’75 into the opening exchanges.

Don’t take this lightly – this was a group of exiled Puerto Rican artists who released their music independently, and now, Bad Bunny, exerting his own independence with a thundering club beat that puts a twist on the ever present Dem Bow rhythm that’s featured in the large portion of Latin music in recent years. Here, there’s a freshness and depth to the music that was immediately picked up on by different generations of Spanish speaking fans, from older mums kicking the sandals off to dance across the kitchen in viral videos, to club DJs being drowned out by the singing of dancefloors around the world.

What makes this whole thing so impressive is that it all feels so deliberate and self assured. We may not have predicted it coming, but from the opening seconds, through the rest of the album, it was clearly a perfectly timed release – and Bad Bunny wasn’t exactly a slouch in the first place. It might be a bit premature to hail the importance of this album like it’s a modern ‘What’s Going On’, but the heft of this album leaves you with a similar feeling in your stomach like having heard ‘To Pimp A Butterfly’ for the first time.

While there’s more than enough for those who just want to dance and have a good time, this time around, Benito touches on colonisation and gentrification, and the long tentacles of North American influence and surveillance.

This time, there’s resistance in the grooves and in the face of blackouts and endangerment on the island. And this is something that will no doubt resonate outside of Puerto Rico too. US investment and tax fiddles have seen outsiders moving to the community, which Bad Bunny relates via the brilliant ‘TURiSTA’, in a tale of a toxic relationship that is underlined by transactions, singing “in my life, you were a tourist – you only saw the best of me and not what I was suffering. You left without knowing the reason for my wounds… and it wasn’t your place to heal them, you came to have a good time.“

Overall, the album shows a version of Bad Bunny more raw than previous outings, but not beaten. He’s channelling the old records of the island – the ‘singing newspapers’ of ‘el periódico cantado’ – and instead of falling into tired tropes, there’s righteous anger and cynicism in the belly and a level of defiance that makes the whole LP absolutely crackle with energy.

There’s callbacks to ’90s reggaeton culture, with burned CDs and tapes sold on street corners and out of the trunks of cars, and in ‘EoO’, with all the swagger in the world, he tell us:

“I feel like a kingpin in the 90s,
I’ve got it rеady, come and feel it”

Once upon a time, the National Guard tried to stamp out street culture in Puerto Rico, and its music with it, and for Bad Bunny to throw back to it, in the current climate, the analogy isn’t lost on anyone.

It is not surprising that DTMF is so cohesive – not only is Bad Bunny more mature as a person and as an artist, but he’s also working with some of the island’s best – the brilliant RaiNao, Dei V, Omar Courtz, Lorén Aldarondo, and more. In the past, there’s been a plethora of bangers, but when Bunny wandered off the beaten path sonically, you wondered if there was more in the bag that he could delve into.

This is the album that answers that question. This is a truly great album that deserves a place amongst the very best. A living, breathing thing that is going to give the club what it wants, but also, a fiercely proud run of tracks that is as full of triumphant clarion calls as it is twists and turns – the competition should be very worried indeed, because now, there’s a new high watermark and Bad Bunny has made the first blockbuster album of 2025.

Essential listening.