Nathy Peluso Hustled Hard To Be This Chill

When Nathy Peluso answers my FaceTime call, I expect the rapper-singer to be holed up in a sterile rehearsal space or a dark studio, given that she’d recently announced a world tour for her urgent new album, Grasa. Instead, the 29-year-old is strolling leisurely through the sun-dappled streets of Madrid, holding her phone in one hand and a perfect mint ice cream cone in the other. She beams as she shows me: “Look, this is how I’m feeling!”

Stealing time away for a little treat might seem like a small thing, but it’s a big deal for Peluso, who kicks off Grasa by putting her own workaholic tendencies on blast: “Esta ambición me está matando” — this ambition is killing me. Over the last few years, she’s built a worldwide following with her no-translation-needed attitude and chameleonic range. One minute, she’s rapping her face off over scorching hip-hop beats. The next, she’s delivering Renaissance-style ballroom bops or doing a full-blown salsa workout. Her debut album, 2020’s Calambre, would go on to win a Latin Grammy Award for best alternative music album.

Her career kicked into overdrive, though, when she teamed up with Argentine producer Bizarrap for “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 36,” a viral standout in his long-running collaboration series. Peluso’s blunt-force bars and cheeky sense of humor — “I’m a nasty girl, fantastic / Este culo es natural, no plastic,” she raps, right after offering to sell her soul for a pizza — put the pair on the global map and helped pave the way for Bizarrap’s internet-breaking hit with Shakira last year. For Peluso, it was years of hustle paying off. “I’m grateful with every step,” she tells me in Spanish, “and I feel that everything that’s happened, whether difficult or easy, is part of my path toward who I need to become in this world.”

Still, finding her footing after breakout success took a minute. “One of the great lessons of this album over these last few years,” she says of Grasa, has been learning “how to reconcile and balance that ambition and give myself space for myself, too.” So in a culture of algorithms that demands more, more, more from artists, Peluso did something radical: She took her time. Beyond unburdening herself from the pressure of deadlines, she wanted to make sure her next body of work was wholly representative of who she is. “I wanted to surpass my own abilities,” she says, and “be honest and talk about my experience, in first person, of what was happening in my life.”

“Not everything has to be productive in a public-facing way. If we keep pushing, it ends up being what it needs to be.”

This has been a lifelong pursuit for Peluso. As a young woman growing up in Argentina and Spain, Peluso describes herself as “sinvergüenza” — a term Spanish-speaking parents might use to scold their rascally children that literally translates to “without shame.” She was the kind of kid who loved gymnastics and belting out Gloria Estefan songs at the top of her lungs. “I was always performing in front of a mirror and asking my mom to record videos of me,” she says. When Peluso was older, she cut her teeth singing in hotels and on the street. At university in Madrid, she studied dance and theater and was “really interested in the investigation of the body” and the way movement can convey a feeling. (This still drives her work today: You don’t need to understand any of “JET_set.mp3” to recognize her power; Peluso’s razor-sharp choreography — with or without the literal sword she’s swinging — makes that plenty clear.)

While in school, Peluso also started cranking out poems for passersby in El Rastro, Madrid’s famed street market, on her Olivetti typewriter. She’d ask people to give her a single word, then type up an original work in two minutes flat. Peluso has been writing songs since age 11, but this hobby unlocked something within her. Because she didn’t have time to second-guess herself, she had to learn to write purely from instinct. The experience “trained me a lot to write in verse,” she says. After that, the rap songs flowed.

Though Peluso still writes quickly, usually by hand in her notebook, Grasa took her four years to make. She even scrapped an entire album’s worth of material that didn’t feel right after heeding the advice of Argentine music icon Fito Páez, a friend and a mentor, who told her to listen to her gut. But Peluso doesn’t consider that lost album a waste of time. “Not everything has to be productive in a public-facing way,” Peluso says. “Every step we take — even though at that moment we haven’t found the meaning in it yet — if we keep pushing, it ends up being what it needs to be.” Plus, if she hadn’t pivoted, she might not have found her way to highlights like “El Día Que Perdí Mi Juventud,” an unexpected ballad with Blood Orange, or the album’s remix project, Club Grasa, which dropped in September. Last week, Grasa even earned Peluso a Grammy nomination for best Latin rock or alternative album.

Her biggest flex? Filming visuals for every track. In the video for “Aprender a Amar,” Peluso delivers a blistering call for self-acceptance as she stares herself down in the mirror. But then the camera spins, flipping her gaze onto the viewer as she raps with increasing ferocity — as if she’s calling you out on your own shit. “It’s a very intimate message that’s about giving yourself attention, of loving yourself,” says Peluso (who’s also up for three Latin Grammy awards this month, including best long-form music video). “Like, ‘Hey, let’s talk. We’re going to talk, you and me, about what we deserve.’ So I had to look within, at myself.”

That is the ultimate takeaway of Grasa: If you don’t know the way forward, stop and look deeper. It’s too early to tell where her next project will take her, but Peluso has been concentrating on “writing down everything that happens to me and giving myself attention,” she says. “In the end, [finding balance] consists of dedicating time to whatever happens and not looking the other way.” It’s a pretty good recipe for making art, too.

Catch Nathy Peluso on tour in 2025.