Clockwise, from top left: Shakira and Fuerza Regida, Peso Pluma, Grupo Frontera and Bad Bunny, and Karol G.Edgar Barrera didn’t need another hit when he started working with Grupo Frontera last year. Over the past decade, the 32-year-old writer-producer has become one of the most prolific and in-demand collaborators in Latin music, with a knack for elevating traditional styles across cultures and a list of credits that includes stars like Alejandro Sanz and Maluma. What he did need, though, was a change of pace.
“I wanted to do things differently,” he explains. “I created my own label, and I wanted to support local acts from my hometown.” When Barrera first heard Frontera perform at a tire-shop opening near McAllen, Texas, the border town where he was raised, he saw a chance to develop the norteño band from the ground up. Soon enough, Barrera had become Frontera’s go-to producer and co-writer, like a seventh member.
By April, they had one of the biggest songs in the world with “Un x100to,” a lovelorn cumbia track featuring Bad Bunny. Along with topping the charts in multiple countries, the song kicked off a Stateside boom in regional Mexican music. It wasn’t just Frontera’s rhythmic, accordion-forward cumbias norteñas — it was heartfelt sierreño music from Eslabon Armado and the rising hip-hop-influenced corridos tumbados from Peso Pluma and Fuerza Regida. Barrera proved to be the perfect producer for this style-blending, borderless moment. He brought together giants of the genre, like Pluma and Frontera on “Tulum” and Frontera and Grupo Firme on “El Amor de Su Vida,” and even introduced Shakira to música mexicana for the song “El Jefe” with Fuerza Regida. “I have got a lot of people saying, ‘Dude, we discovered this new sound of Mexican music, of Grupo Frontera,’” Barrera says. “We laugh because it’s a sound that’s very popular from the area where we’re from, and it has been since the 1960s and ’70s.”
Now Barrera is the top nominee at this year’s Latin Grammys, up for 13 awards including Producer and Songwriter of the Year and Song of the Year for “Un x100to.” He also just added a Songwriter of the Year nod for the larger 2024 Grammys. (Despite the nominations, the regional Mexican scene wasn’t fully embraced by Latin Grammy voters this year, with corridos tumbados acts receiving zero nominations; Barrera also represents the lone general-category nod for Latin music at the 2024 ceremony.) As he surveys the reach of música mexicana over the past year, he’s only more excited for the future. “All of this — Karol G doing this and Shakira doing that — is what’s going to get our culture bigger,” says Barrera, as he shares the stories behind four of his most genre-bending regional hits. “This whole movement’s going to be here for a while.”
“Un x100to,” Grupo Frontera & Bad Bunny
If somebody would’ve told me that this was gonna happen, I would’ve never believed it. When we recorded this song, Payos, the singer of Grupo Frontera, said, “Dude, what if — can we get Bad Bunny to feature on this song?” And I was just laughing. Bad Bunny is the biggest artist in the world. But I met his producer, MAG, at a BMI awards ceremony. We were just having a beer and talking about music, and he mentioned that Bunny was a big fan of the band. He was like, “When we’re in the studio listening to music and vibing, he’s listening to Grupo Frontera.” I couldn’t believe it. Two days later, he had recorded the song, and we were shooting the video three days after that. The turnaround of everything happened in a week and a half or so.
This was all Benito. He wanted to respect the culture; he wanted to respect the band’s sound. So when he jumped onto the record, he’s like, “When I come in, I want to come in with my sound, and then they start coming in, and we blend and finish the song together.” This whole idea of changing the sound when he comes in, this was all his idea. It was the right way to do it. It’s a very traditional sound from our culture and our border where we grew up. Bunny wanting to come in and do something he’s never done before and respect the sound is an easy way for us to put it out there in the world. I think that’s the clever part. I was talking to some friends in Puerto Rico, and it’s really hard for Mexican music to go into the island. Now everybody’s listening to Grupo Frontera.
“Tulum,” Peso Pluma & Grupo Frontera
We have a really good relationship with Peso Pluma. We met way before Frontera made it and before he made it. We always say in order to make the genre bigger, we gotta work in collaboration. I remember “Un x100to” and “Ella Baila Sola” were competing on the charts. But between us, we were having fun. That just made us bond a lot more. We looked at it like, “Dude, we’re putting our culture out there.” And that’s when we decided, “Yo, what if we make a song together?”
As a writer, I always say that I write every genre. I just came last week from being in New York working on stuff in English. If a song is good enough to sing with guitar and vocals and connect like that, it’ll sound good with whatever genre you put it in. And that’s what I feel like with Peso Pluma and Frontera — they are in completely different genres, but at the end of the day, we both come from Mexico. We both admire songs from Juan Gabriel, from José Alfredo Jiménez, from Juan Sebastian or Ariel Camacho. That’s where we both connected.
“El Jefe,” Shakira & Fuerza Regida
I flew out to L.A. to work with her and Keityn, the other co-writer of the song. Our idea was not to do a corridos tumbados song. It was supposed to be like a reggae-ska kind of vibe. For some reason, there was a 12-string guitar in the studio, and I was just fooling around and playing a bunch of stuff, playing the style of corridos. Shakira was like, “What is that?” And I was like, “Oh, this is the style that is going on in Mexico right now,” and she fell in love with it. She loved how original and how different it was from everything that was popping. So she was the one that had the idea of “Why don’t we do this song with that style but keeping it ska so it can have my vibe on it?” We wrote the song right there in the studio, we produced it together, and then Fuerza Regida hopped on the record. So now we have Shakira going into the Mexican world.
“Gucci Los Paños,” Karol G
Karol is one of the few artists who actually started doing this type of sound years ago. She’s a big fan of Mexican music, and you can tell because it sounds authentic on her. That’s one thing I always try to find whenever I work with artists who want to do Mexican music but are not Mexican. Colombia and Mexico are very, very similar. I go to Colombia and I feel like I’m in Mexico because of the culture. Everybody there listens to Mexican music, and she has a real passion for Mexican music.
She told me she wanted to do one of those songs that sounds very despecho. It’s a heartbreak song but urban style. Saying the only thing that hurts me about breaking up with you is because I bought all these handkerchiefs from Gucci, I’m throwing away all these Gucci handkerchiefs. I brought in this sound that was different for her: Ariel Camacho’s style, who’s a legend in música sierreño. We wanted to do this tribute to this type of music.
She’s like, “What is this sound right here? I want that sound.” “Oh, that’s a tuba.” “Yes, I want a tuba in my song.” She gave me a lot of references. She loved the experiment of singing with the tuba. It’s really fun going to a show for Karol because you see a tuba player and you see an accordion, and it just makes the show feel more authentic.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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And being positioned as opposites, following Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s praise of Frontera and criticism of Pluma’s depiction of violence. The genre-crossing singer-songwriter who was the best-selling Mexican musician of all time. A formative Mexican ranchera musician. A prolific Mexican songwriter, mainly of banda music, who has won the most Grammys of any Mexican artist. The young singer-songwriter who helped popularize anguished sierreño music in the mid-2010s. Which makes a fuller sound and is essential to styles like corridos. Spiteful. Edgar Barrera’s Genre-Bending Vision for Música MexicanancG1vNJzZmivp6x7t8HLrayrnV6YvK57kWlpbGdhZnymsMaaqWaakae%2Fpr7AZqmen5mku6K4jKacsaGTlrtuudSsoJxll6fCsbuMn6mopqSav6J6x62kpQ%3D%3D