Drake, Diplo and El Alfa are featured on the 15-track effort.
Feliz Noche Buena! Bad Bunny finally released his full-length debut, X100pre, on Christmas Eve and it’s everything you were hoping for. The Puerto Rican Latin trap rapper/singer told Billboard he was planning to finally unleash his 15-track first full album (whose name translates to an acronym for “Por Siempre” — Forever) on Christmas Eve, “Real, real, real, real, I finished the album three days ago,” the artist born Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio said on the phone from his home in Puerto Rico. “At that point I said I wanted to release it in Christmas. I didn’t want the year to end without releasing the album. I wanted to close 2018 with it.”
The rapper said he’d been working on the project for six months, and recently finished it by wrapping the song “Como antes [As Before],’ the first track they recorded for the album. Though Bunny has established a rep as the king of the collaboration — appearing on such smashes as “Te Boté” with Ozuna and Nicky Jam and Cardi B’s “I Like It” — X100pre only has three cameos: Diplo on “200 MPH,” Drake on the recent single “Mia” and Dominican singer El Alfa on “La Romana.”
The album opens with the urgent trap ballad “Ni Bien Ni Mal” (Not Good or Bad), on which the singer promises a departed lover that “whatever happens, I’m not going to call you,” before sliding into the Diplo-assisted “200 MPH,” which trips along on a skittery beat and lyrics about gunning a jetski and partying in the tropics. On the melancholy”¿Quien Tu Eres?,” he croons “Who are you?/ Tell me partner, who are you?/ To get close to me, who are you?,” before basically daring someone to step to him, listing off his accomplishments and warning them to ask around about him in a fierce English-language outro.
The album also includes “Caro” (Expensive), about how high-dollar Bunny’s flow is, the fiery “La Romana” with the fleet-tongued El Alfa, the new wavey, guitar-spiked “Tenemos Que Hablar” (We Need to Talk) and the broken-hearted “Solo de Mi” (Just Me), which bounces from a midtempo lost love lament to a cranked up reggaeton jam in the second half, fueled by what sounds like a child’s keyboard.
Listen to X100pre below.
