Nathy Peluso on “Grasa” tour, goes viral and her bizarre rap outburst

When Nathy Peluso answers my FaceTime call, I expect the rapper and singer to be hiding out in a sterile rehearsal room or dark studio, as she recently announced a world tour for her urgent new album. Grasa. Instead, the 29-year-old leisurely strolls through the sun-drenched streets of Madrid, her cell phone in one hand and a perfect mint ice cream cone in the other. She beams as she shows me: “Look, that’s how I feel!”

Stealing time for a little reward may seem like a small thing, but for Peluso, who makes the start, it's a big deal Grasa by putting her own workaholic tendencies to the test: “Esta ambición me está matando” – This ambition is killing me. Over the past few years, she has built a global following with her no-translation attitude and chameleonic range. One moment she's rapping her face off to hot hip-hop beats. The next moment she delivers RenaissanceB. Dancing in the ballroom or a full-blown salsa workout. Her debut album, 2020's Calambresubsequently won a Latin Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album.

However, her career took off when she teamed up with Argentine producer Bizarrap for “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 36,” a viral highlight of his long-running collaboration series. Peluso's blunt force rods and cheeky sense of humor – “I'm a bad girl, fantastic / Este culo es natural, no plastic,” she raps, right after offering to sell her soul for a pizza – brought the couple on World Map and helped pave the way for Bizarrap's breakthrough hit with Shakira last year. For Peluso, it was years of effort that paid off. “I am grateful for every step,” she tells me in Spanish, “and I feel like everything that has happened, difficult or easy, is part of my path to becoming who I need to become in this world.”

Nevertheless, it took a minute until she found her footing again after her resounding success. “One of the great lessons this album has learned over the last few years,” she says GrasaShe has learned “how to reconcile and balance this ambition and also give myself space for myself.” In a culture of algorithms that demands more and more, more Of artists, Peluso did something radical: she took her time. Not only did she want to relieve herself of the pressure of deadlines, but she also wanted to ensure that her next work was completely representative of herself. “I wanted to surpass my own abilities,” she says, and “be honest and talk about my experiences in the first person, what was happening in my life.”

“Not everything has to be publicly accessible. If we keep pushing, it will be what it needs to be in the end.”

This has been a lifelong pursuit for Peluso. As a young woman who grew up in Argentina and Spain, Peluso describes herself as “sinvergüenza” — a term Spanish-speaking parents might use to scold their mischievous children, which literally translates to “without shame.” She was the kind of child who loved to sing Gloria Estefan songs and do gymnastics at the top of her lungs. “I used to stand in front of the mirror and ask my mom to take videos of me,” she says. When Peluso was older, she sang in hotels and on the streets. She studied dance and theater at the University of Madrid and was “very interested in exploring the body” and how movement can convey feeling. (That's what still drives her work today: You don't have to understand “JET_set.mp3” to recognize its power; Peluso's razor-sharp choreography – with or without literal sword it swings – makes that clear.)

While in school, Peluso also began writing poems on her Olivetti typewriter for passersby at El Rastro, Madrid's famous street market. She asked people to tell her a single word and then typed an original work within two minutes. Peluso has been writing songs since she was 11, but this hobby unlocked something in her. Since she had no time to think about herself, she had to learn to write purely instinctively. The experience “taught me a lot about writing in verse,” she says. After that the rap songs flowed.

Although Peluso still writes quickly, mostly by hand in her notebook, Grasa It took four years to make. She even scrapped an entire album's worth of material that didn't feel right after following the advice of Argentine music icon Fito Páez, a friend and mentor, who told her to listen to her gut. But Peluso doesn't think this lost album is a waste of time. “Not everything has to be publicly accessible,” says Peluso. “Every step we take – even if we haven't found the meaning of it at that moment – if we keep pushing, in the end it will be what it needs to be.” And if she hadn't changed course, she would have may not have found its way to highlights like “El Día Que Perdí Mi Juventud,” an unexpected ballad with Blood Orange, or the album’s remix project. Club Grasawhich fell in September. Last week, Grasa Peluso even received a Grammy nomination for Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album.

Your biggest flex? Footage for each title. In the video for “Aprender a Amar,” Peluso loudly calls for self-acceptance as she stares into the mirror. But then the camera turns and focuses on the viewer as she knocks with increasing intensity – as if she were calling You Go to your own shit. “It's a very intimate message about paying attention to yourself and loving yourself,” says Peluso (who is also nominated 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 I, about what we deserve.” So I had to look inward, at myself.”

This is the ultimate insight Grasa: If you don't know the way forward, stop and look deeper. It's too early to say where her next project will take her, but Peluso has focused on “writing down everything that happens to me and paying attention to myself,” she says. “In the end, [finding balance] is to take your time with everything that's happening and not look away.” It's also a pretty good recipe for making art.

Catch Nathy Peluso on tour in 2025.