The FADER’s longstanding GEN F series profiles the emerging artists you need to know right now.
Nico Malva is always hungry. Growing up in San Luis Colorado — a border town in Sonora, Mexico — his Sundays were centered on carne asadas, massive grill-outs where families and friends gather for no reason in particular. “It’s just a celebration,” he says. “You're not celebrating anything, really, just that your family's healthy.”
“It’s a ritual,” adds Henny Fay.
Malva and Fay are sitting at the foot of the bed in a San Francisco hotel room, halfway through a six-date West Coast tour as the culture-bending band Corridos Ketamina. Malva has a classically emo look: long, scrappy bangs swerving naturally around his cheeks and framing his face in offset curves. He’s dressed for comfort, swaddled in a black hoodie with a blanket over his legs.
Fay has a more boyish demeanor. He’s hunched forward sporting square-framed glasses and a black tee printed with white jack-o-lantern features. “We’d walk from where we lived in East Hollywood to Griffith Park, and my mom would marinate a chicken in Sunny D and a bunch of spices and throw it on the grill,” he says, sharing his own memories of attending carne asadas. “It's traditional as fuck.”
Corridos Ketamina is steeped in that tradition, too, but also in the culture of the internet. The band’s sound is a novel collision of a centuries-old form of Mexican outlaw music and styles that range from trap and cloud rap to punk and emo. Incepted by Fay and Malva in 2024, it pushes corridos tumbados — a style that combines elements of trap music with modernized “narcocorridos” — to the left and has grown a community of true believers. It celebrates a proud and distinctly Mexican lineage, but it also incorporates the cannibalistic appetite of the Gen-Z music nerd and a type of aesthetic shapeshifting that’s only achievable online.
It’s traditional as fuck.
In an interview with the band last year, Malva said they made it a point to make music that people in their age group could embrace without feeling like a minority. “We don’t want to frame our project as a struggle; we want to have a power culture attached to it,” he added. This fall, Corridos Ketamina will release La Cktriz (a stylized spelling of “la cicatriz” or “the scar”), the project they hope will take the movement global.
Fay and Malva met in the late 2010s through online internet friends. Back then, Malva was based in Phoenix, Arizona, but constantly traveling to Los Angeles to make music and play shows with his previous band. The duo didn’t start collaborating until much more recently, around 2024. They took a full year to conceptualize their sonic and visual aesthetics before actually hitting record.
CK’s 2025 self-titled debut EP gave the world its first sample of their omnivorous palate, distilling the ethos of the sound most perfectly on the track “Ketitz.” “Le gusta el sexo sin la protección,” Fay sings over traditional acoustic bass and guitar, his voice awash with Auto-Tune. Later, he hits a triplet flow, a nod to the Atlanta trap he and Malva fell in love with as teens.
The EP reached the right people, and soon Fay and Malva found themselves opening for esteemed experimental Phoenix rap duo By Storm, genre-twisting Spanish singer-producer Rusowsky, Iceage frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, and spectral singer-songwriter Joanne Robinson. “We’ve been studying them and taking things we like from their performances,” Fay says. “And we’ve been studying our chemistry and trying to manifest what we want our performances to look like in the near future.”
They’ve since manifested a new sound, one that’s poppier and more polished, but also more dynamic. On “K Me Maten,” La Cktriz’s lead single, Fay and Malva sing pop melodies over a melodramatic arrangement, but the song is far from radio fare. The drums crash jarringly, the guitar melts into dissonance, and the lyrics — “Consúmame, escúpame, disfrutame, y luego mátame” (“Consume me, spit on me, enjoy me, and then kill me”) — describe a strain of toxic, obsessive love far too complex for the airwaves. Other songs on the forthcoming project show different facets of their development in the past year. There’s an ambient corrido mixed like a Cocteau Twins cut, featuring a line about a “buchona estilo Björk,” or a woman with niche music taste and a “BBL aesthetic,” Malva explains.
The vocal performances are inspired by Michael Jackson, the Beatles, Enrique Iglesias, Justin Timberlake, and Juan Gabriel, a Mexican pop icon who’s been an inspiration for Malva and Fay. “He got arrested for stealing cologne,” Malva says. “He was broke, but he still cared about his swag and his scent. He reminds us of us.”
We’re also representing what our culture’s not, and what it can be.
Food and eating also figure heavily into the music’s narrative. “This fool [Henny] is always like, ‘Bro, you’re always writing about food. You’re like MF DOOM,’” Malva says. Fay is especially obsessed with aguachiles, the Mexican version of ceviche. His love for the dish stems from weekend mornings combing through food trucks in the Boyle Heights projects with his father, who’d settle for nothing but the freshest, best-marinated shrimp.
Perhaps the best example of the band’s unique cross section of tastes was captured in a video they shot earlier this year, pitting their favorite foods (aguachiles) and artists (Juan Gabriel, Ye, Yung Lean, Natanael Cano) against each other. Aguachiles ultimately took the title, but Lean beat Natanael Cano, the 25-year-old godfather of corridos tumbados, in an early-round upset. CK’s sound is much closer to Cano’s than Lean’s, and Fay and Malva both say they feel a deeper connection to Cano’s music, but Malva credits Lean with showing him how to be an “online artist.” This aesthetic tug-of-war is the CK movement’s defining quality.
More than just a band or even a movement, Corridos Ketamina is the face of a weirder, more inclusive and eclectic community under the umbrella of Mexican and Mexican-American culture at large. “We’ve never claimed it as ours because we want people to claim it as theirs,” Malva says. “Even the audience: With every win we get, they’re winning as well because they’re getting represented. We’re always gonna represent our culture, but we’re also representing what our culture’s not, and what it can be.”
