Design by Tyler Farmer
Here’s how a group of friends, musicians, and multi-disciplinary artists in Spain became some of the most in-demand collaborators in the music industry.
August 27, 2026
During my conversation with pablopablo, I ask when he first realized something unusual was happening around him in Spain. His answer is less grand than you might expect.
“I kinda sort of woke up to it, like, ‘Oh, wow. Good morning. Spain is, like, on fire.’”
It’s funny, but it also gets at the problem with trying to explain what is happening in Spanish music right now. From the outside, it looks increasingly like a movement. The same names appear across records, production credits, music videos, festivals, labels, and friend groups: Rusowsky, Ralphie Choo, Judeline, Guitarricadelafuente, pablopablo, Mori, TRISTÁN!, and others orbiting around them. Their audiences have grown far beyond Madrid and Barcelona, stretching through Latin America, Europe, and increasingly into the United States.
But listen to the music itself and any neat definition starts to collapse.
Ralphie Choo can move between flamenco, reggaeton, experimental pop, and electronic production within the same project. Judeline folds Andalusian tradition and Venezuelan references into a world informed just as strongly by contemporary global pop. pablopablo can sound like a classic songwriter one moment and deliberately destabilize that familiarity the next. TRISTÁN!’s early electronic experimentation has given way to acoustic instruments and more conventional pop structures. Rusowsky has built an atmospheric language that feels immediately recognizable without being tethered to any one genre.
They don’t really sound alike at first listen, and maybe that's the point. What seems to connect this generation is less a shared sound than a shared permission to follow instinct wherever it goes: toward pop or away from it, backward into tradition or outward into the rest of the world, from music into film, photography, fashion, and back to music again.
When I ask TRISTÁN! what people outside Spain misunderstand about the group, he pushes against the premise entirely. “People see it as a movement, but this is not [a] movement. It’s just people making music,” he says. Maybe the most interesting thing about Spain’s new wave is that the people creating it have little interest in defining it.
Years before the international press began looking to Madrid for the next wave of Spanish music, many of the artists now grouped together were simply finding one another online. Judeline had just arrived in Madrid when she met Ralphie Choo. She was finishing high school and he was still in university.
“We had zero money, zero contacts,” she remembers. “We randomly met on the Internet, and then we made a little bit of music.” A weekend later, she met Rusowsky. Looking back, she doesn’t describe the connection in terms of genre or even a shared plan. “I think we connected because we had [the same] taste.”
TRISTÁN! remembers the network forming in much the same way: SoundCloud, Instagram, mutual friends, exchanged demos, music videos passed back and forth. What now looks from the outside like a coherent creative ecosystem developed slowly and informally.
“It was a really progressive thing,” he says. At first, what they were doing felt “really underground” even within Spain.
The internet didn’t give these artists a common sound so much as it gave people with unusually specific tastes a way to recognize one another. They could find peers before an industry existed around them, and then develop in proximity to people who were just as interested in pulling things apart. That closeness still shapes how the music gets made. TRISTÁN! describes an ongoing exchange of demos, videos, references, and discoveries between friends. Judeline puts it more simply: “Everyone is getting influenced by everyone.” Yet the result of all that influence has not been sameness. It may have produced the opposite.
This ecosystem is clearly still evolving, even by artists who haven't yet become widely known. Now, another artist is emerging through the same internet fringes where so much of this began.
Ralphie Choo
Rusowsky
TRISTÁN!
Judeline
Duna, a 20-year-old Catalan singer, songwriter, and producer with Argentine roots is the latest signing to Rusia IDK, the Madrid label and collective that is home to Ralphie Choo, rusowksy, TRISTÁN!, and Mori. So far, she has remained deliberately elusive. She has done almost no interviews or public appearances, allowing the music to circulate through the corners of the internet where her project first began.
Even that beginning was accidental. Duna started uploading songs to SoundCloud simply because she didn’t know how to export them properly. People found them anyway, and encouraged her to keep creating.
She has little formal training in music theory and describes an approach built instead around instinct, curiosity, production, and moving between genres without feeling obligated to settle into one.
It's hard not to notice the symmetry. Years earlier, the people now being described internationally as a Spanish “movement” were finding one another in similar ways. Now, Rusia IDK is bringing another artist from those fringes into the fold.
pablopablo gives perhaps the clearest explanation of the contradiction. “I just adore pop music,” he tells me. “But then also I do love doing really weird shit.” While we speak, he laughs about never feeling completely at home on either side. “I’ve tried to hang out with the super cool kids, and…I just feel too poppy. And then I hang out with the pop kids, and I’m way too weird.”
That tension runs throughout his 2025 LP Canciones en Mi. The album is formally restrained. Every song is written in E major, but the limitation wasn’t initially some conceptual exercise. He simply noticed that several of the songs happened to be in the same key and decided to keep following the instinct.
“The more I gave into the things that felt too easy, too natural,” he explains, “the more I got closer to writing some of my best work.” His production process follows a similar logic. In an era when a vocal can be tuned, a rhythm quantized, and nearly any imperfection corrected in seconds, pablopablo sometimes does the opposite.
“I try and force mistakes, a lot,” he says. The mistakes don’t stay simply because they are mistakes. “I’ll only keep the ones that I think are beautiful.” But leaving room for accident means allowing something into the music that he could not have planned.
Even his lyrics emerge that way. Many begin in morning pages of free writing where, as he puts it, “out of 100 lines of bullshit, there’s one line that means something.”
The emotional openness of this generation of Spanish artists doesn’t necessarily come from saying everything explicitly. Sometimes it comes from leaving enough space for something uncontrolled to survive.
For Judeline, instinct means something different.
Listening to Bodhiria, it would be easy to describe the album as a deliberate meeting point between Andalusian tradition and futuristic production. But when I ask her about that balance, she gently dismantles the premise.
“I’ll say I got more influenced by the outside for the album,” she says. “And the folklore and the roots and the sound from Spain was just what was there. You know? What I am and all I know.”
The Andalusian influence didn’t need to be researched because it already existed in her body and memory. Venezuelan joropo, a tradition connected to her father, required a different relationship. She studied it, identified what mattered to her, and made her own interpretation.
“I think it’s just important to not judge yourself,” she says. That lack of self-policing extends beyond sound. Judeline often begins building the visual language of a project before the music itself is finished. For Bodhiria, she remembers making a Pinterest mood board long before the record was complete. Colors, film scenes, stories, and fairy tales become part of the writing process. “When I’m hearing the music, I also feel colors and aesthetics and movie scenes,” she explains.
Yet despite the intimacy of her work, she is less interested in straightforward autobiography than in invention. “For me, to imagine is to be free,” Judeline says. Writing only from her own experiences, she says, creates “limitations” and “a cage.” Imagining something that never happened allows the song to move somewhere larger.
That idea complicates another easy interpretation of this generation: that emotional music necessarily means confessional music. The emotions can be real even when the world surrounding them is invented.
For Ralphie Choo, knowing too much about the history can sometimes make instinct harder to access. “The more I know about something, the more that genuine intention behind the expression gets distorted, and the more I feel constrained by the existing paths rather than blazing my own trail through the wilderness and forging my own path.”
He puts it more provocatively: “I think that disrespect (not in the sense of a negative or vulgar trait), aside from being charming, is necessary.”
It's an interesting counterpoint to Judeline. Her Andalusian references feel instinctive because they were already around her; Venezuelan joropo became something she consciously studied and reinterpreted. Ralphie is more suspicious of knowledge itself when it begins dictating what an artist is supposed to do. Neither approach treats tradition as something that needs to remain untouched.
That may be one reason Ralphie's recent work feels like another shift rather than an attempt to repeat SUPERNOVA. “The Ralphie from five years ago is nothing like the one I am now,” he says. He describes that evolution as a movement toward “something more honest and less alienated,” where “the tragedies are now, fortunately, beautiful tragedies, and the overstimulation that was palpable in my previous work has now given way to something more measured and contemplative.”
“Now more than ever,” he adds, “I want to make honest music.”
One characteristic that recurs across this group is in how broadly they define an artist’s job.
TRISTÁN! studied cinema before music. When he writes a song, he is already thinking about the cover, the music video, the imagery surrounding it. “I don’t consider just the song,” he says. For him, it's a part of the story.
Through Fomotrauma, the visual project he shares with Mori, that instinct extends into other artists’ work. The pair have helped shape visual worlds around rusowsky and Ralphie Choo, moving between music videos, artwork, merchandizing, and larger creative direction.
Working for someone else can even offer more freedom than building his own world. On his own, there are forms of exposure and risk he might instinctively avoid. When working with another artist, those restrictions loosen.
That was particularly true while working on rusowsky’s visual world. Compared with the low-budget videos Fomotrauma had been making themselves, a larger production gave them permission to imagine more ambitious versions of their ideas.
The collaboration has now moved beyond music. TRISTÁN! and Mori are developing a feature film through Fomotrauma that they plan to shoot in Madrid.
The same people aren’t just appearing on each other’s songs, they’re directing each other’s videos, shaping visual worlds, and creating the kind of space where someone else’s instincts are welcomed.
It’s a feeling that extends into every medium, especially collaboration. pablopablo feels that while writing with Guitarricadelafuente. What stayed with him wasn’t only the final outcome, but the process. “With Guitarrica, I remember feeling like the space that he created for writing really brought out very interesting things in me that I didn't really know existed,” he says. “His way of writing lyrics was so free.”
He was particularly drawn to Guitarrica's willingness to embrace abstract, almost surrealist images. It’s something he recognized in his own writing but had previously been hesitant to incorporate into his work.
“I'll say random shit and he'll be like, ‘Oh, no, no. That's great. That's the line.’ And so we'd keep that line. That really made me grow as a songwriter. [Realizing] that was me. I came up with that. Maybe I can try doing that on my own. That was hugely rewarding.” What stayed with him wasn't only the final outcome, but the freedom Guitarrica created around the process.
Ralphie Choo talks about collaboration in similarly human terms. “Above all, aside from the admiration I feel for them, there’s a genuine human connection,” he says. “I think the most beautiful and mutually beneficial thing you can do in a collaboration is to dig deep until you find the person behind that project.”
pablopablo
Guitarricadelafuente
DUNA
Mori
For Mori, the most important part of that exchange was even simpler. “More than anything, I think what really defined us was talking. Talking and talking,” he says. “We’d spend hours sharing ideas, films, music, images, references.” Maybe this is the distinction between a shared sound and a shared sensibility. The closeness of this community isn't making everyone more alike. It is creating the conditions for each artist to take their own instincts more seriously.
For rusowsky, that experimentation happens among people he describes more intimately: “It’s really comfy and fun always because we explore those limits together, an enjoyable thing to do with your chosen family.” That last phrase feels closer to what many of these conversations describe than “scene” ever could.
If anything, being surrounded by people willing to entertain an unfinished or unusual idea seems to have given these artists more permission to trust their own instincts. Maybe this explains why so much cross-pollination hasn't resulted in everyone moving toward the same place.
The practice of trusting in instinct keeps surfacing in different forms with each artist. Not necessarily honesty as confession, but honesty as an unwillingness to correct an instinct before understanding where it might lead.
For pablopablo, that means forcing mistakes. For Judeline, it means not judging herself. For rusowsky, uncertainty itself can be evidence that something is working. “The more out of place I feel in the creative process, the more confident I become that I’m heading in the right direction,” he says.
That same trust shapes Mori's debut album, El Niño Bola. As one of the artists still relatively early in his career, he could reasonably be expected to treat a debut as an introduction to explain who he is and establish exactly where he belongs. Instead, he explains, “I wasn’t really thinking about listeners while I was making it. I always try to make music for myself first. In a way, I think that’s the best thing you can do for the people listening, too.”
For Mori, that confidence didn't necessarily arrive fully formed. “It took me a long time to feel even somewhat proud of the music I put out,” he says. “I just try to trust my instincts while they’re still there.”
As the audience around these artists grows, the question becomes increasingly complicated. What does it even mean for this music to represent Spain? rusowsky's answer is immediate when I ask whether he feels any responsibility to expand international perceptions of Spanish music: “Not at all. I can only represent myself and what naturally emerges from my own experience.”
Judeline has encountered the inverse problem while working internationally: collaborators sometimes arrive with an idea of what ‘Spanishness’ should sound like. The instinct can be to reach immediately for recognizable signifiers: flamenco claps, a certain guitar, a folkloric gesture.
Her response is equally direct: “No. No. No. I’m not looking for this.”
“We can do our sound.” That doesn't mean tradition has disappeared.
Guitarricadelafuente offers almost the opposite example. Spanish Leather from last year embraces historical and acoustic references openly; “BABIECA!” even begins with a zanfona, or hurdy-gurdy, an instrument whose history stretches back centuries.
Judeline resisting an expected Spanish guitar and Guitarricadelafuente carrying a medieval instrument onto American television aren't opposing gestures. They're evidence of the same freedom. Spanishness can be central or incidental, respected or deliberately mishandled. It doesn't have to arrive in one predetermined form.
Ralphie makes a similar point from another angle. “I don’t think we’re inventing anything either,” he says. “We’ve simply adapted as best we can to the possibilities of our time, drawing on the legacy that many great artists have left us.”
Rusowsky describes his own relationship to the past less as quotation than accumulation. “Everything I’ve ever loved musically has been archived somewhere in my mind and over time it has become like an internal library that I unconsciously think from when I create: small musical cells, timbres, instruments, rhythms that I reimagine without even realizing it. It became part of the language I write in.”
If the music itself resists borders, its audience increasingly does too. Spain occupies a particular cultural geography: unmistakably European, but linked to Latin America through language, migration, history, and a constant exchange of culture. rusowsky sees music moving through that relationship almost automatically. “There’s a constant cultural exchange between both places, so music travels between them quite naturally.”
His own growing international audience hasn't made him reconsider how he creates. “I definitely do music in the exact same way I always do,” he says. “Maybe that’s exactly why it became more international, creating without boundaries and not thinking about what’s the point of doing it, just having fun.”
This generation's international trajectory doesn't necessarily follow the older story of becoming successful at home and then attempting an American crossover. Audiences already exist across Spain, Latin America, and Europe. In many cases, the United States is the place arriving later.
Guitarricadelafuente's recent trajectory makes that geography visible. For him, 2026 began with his first U.S. tour and sold-out dates around the country, followed by performances across Latin America including Lollapalooza Argentina, Lollapalooza Chile, Estéreo Picnic, and Tecate Pa’l Norte. His U.S. television debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live! came after an audience had already been developing across several continents.
TRISTÁN! remembers when international listeners had fewer reference points for experimental Spanish-language music. For a period, he says, “the shadow of Rosalía” meant artists making anything unconventional in Spanish could quickly find themselves compared to her. But he also sees the doors that her success helped open. Her movement between Spanish music and American and British collaborators expanded the possibilities of international audiences associated with Spanish-language pop, while reggaeton had already begun dismantling the idea that language itself needed to be a barrier.
America isn't discovering the beginning of this story this time. Instead, it’s catching up to something that learned how to move without it.
Whatever is happening in Spain doesn’t seem particularly interested in becoming one thing. The artists found each other before anyone knew what to call it. They influenced one another without agreeing on a sound. Their audiences crossed borders before an industry narrative caught up.
Maybe the most exciting thing about Spain’s new emotional underground is that nobody seems to know exactly what it is yet, even the people creating it.