Next Up For CNCO: How About Everything?

Ask CNCO where they’d like to travel next, and so they have top list ready and waiting for you.


“Australia, we haven’t been there,” Richard Camacho offers at the outset. Joel Pimentel agrees.


“Egypt,” Erick Brian Colón adds.


“China,” Zabdiel de Jesús says.


“Cuba.”


“Yeah, China,” Pimentel echoes.


“Cuba!”


“We haven’t been to Dubai,” Christopher Vélez says. “I would love to go to Dubai.”


“Did you guys mention Australia?”


They build on each other’s advice happily, their camaraderie a sort of choreography in its own right. It’s easy to sit back and talk big plans with them — where they’ll travel to next, who they’d love to collaborate with, what objectives they desire to achieve with each other. A Grammy, if they’re able, maybe a TV series of their own. And for a crowd that has, in the past year alone, performed at the VMAs pre-show, taken the Latin AMAs by storm, and seen their faces dozens of feet high in Times Square and above Hollywood’s biggest intersections, you get the sense that few things could be out of reach.


They are quick to admit that everything they’ve done and seen for now has been pretty surreal. “Being able to do all of this in such a short quantity of time has been a dream come true,” Pimentel tells MTV News, referring to the fateful first season of La Banda that joined them with each other in 2015. Since then, they’ve released two albums; toured with mentor and music legend Ricky Martin, along with because the likes of  Ariana Grande, Pitbull, and Enrique Iglesias; collaborated with groups like Little Mix and PRETTYMUCH; and just dropped a new EP, Que Quiénes Somos.


Nevertheless the accolades are nothing without the fans, wherever the CNCOwners are from, and whichever language they speak. “Our music is going places we never expected,” Colón says. “We’ve been to Asia and Europe and people have instructed us they’re learning Spanish from our music. That’s amazing.”


An estimated 577 million people worldwide speak Spanish, which is roughly 7.6 percent of the global population. Nevertheless even countries with significant Latinx and Spanish-speaking populations, like the U.S., Have often faltered with giving adequate shine to music that features one of the most typical languages in the world. Plenty of non-Latinx artists also take inspiration from the genre, resulting in some of the biggest songs in recent memory. Still, some people still imagine Spanish-language songs that succeed in a English-language market to be “crossover” hits, or outliers — so much so that award shows create entire offshoots for the Spanish-language market, which plenty of us know as our normal more than a niche.


The ability to succeed globally, then, isn’t lost on CNCO. “Seeing all of those different countries — including the United States, accepting Latin music, it’s super cool,” Pimentel says. “Being able to display ourselves with Latin music makes us very proud.”


“Social media has damaged a lot of barriers for us,” de Jesús adds, and Colón points to the broad democratization of streaming as just one way people can discover their music, or any music in a language other than English.


Que Quiénes Somos comes in at a tight seven songs, including the lead single “De Cero,” which reflects on how far two people in a relationship have come from the begin of their courtship (literally, from zero). Some songs on the album, including “De Cero” and “De Mì,” feature English-language interludes, however the project relies heavily on Spanish-language pop and plenty of customary guitars, which are on full display in the Manuel Turizo collab,  “Pegao.” “Tóxica,” a ballad about a destructive relationship, slows things down significantly at the end of the set with a capella harmonizing that showcases the group’s vocal ability.


“This EP was our first writing camp,” Camacho explains of the creative process in back of the release. “We just felt fire because we may could realistically put down our ideas, and we were just writing constantly — about different stories and different things.” He estimates the order wrote over 20 songs in that two-week length, which allowed for plenty of bonding. “We actually connected more,” he adds. “We noticed each other a little more, and we noticed our sound a little more.”


De Jesús says it’s been fun to play with a lot of musical genres in the group’s four-year shared history. “We’ve done ballads, pop, electronic music… We did pop rock in the initial album,” he notes. Still, he’s especially keen to take on even more: “We haven’t done bachata, and we haven’t done salsa.”


“In ‘Ya Tú Sabes,’ it’s like salsa mixed with trap,” Vélez offers. “But a full salsa, that would be dope.” Camacho immediately offers up Marc Anthony as a possible collab. (The consensus? “That’d be amazing,” all five echo.)


there really are several artists on their list of musical inspiration: Billie Eilish and Daddy Yankee top the list. Pimentel shouts out Maluma (“of course”), while de Jesús is quick to nominate Bruno Mars. Their list of dream collaborators is just as varied: Ed Sheeran, Backstreet Men, Normani, and Post Malone all earn nods. Someone points out that NSYNC has been up to something lately on social media, so maybe there’s space to link up there, too.


Until then, the order is just as excited for “Me Necesita,” a bilingual effort with PRETTYMUCH  that serves as an implosion of boy-band swagger: The two groups’s voices sing in tandem about the ladies that just can’t quit them. “Basically she’s attempting to play hard to get although you’re telling her, ‘At the end of the day, we need each other,’ you know?” Camacho explains.


“It’s 10 people singing one song, so it felt crazy, nevertheless it’s beautiful,” Pementel adds.


The video for the track also pulls on a Latinx-American staple: futbol... Or soccer, if you’re stateside. “The video is cool,” Colón says approvingly, explaining that it’s like a superpowered version of the game complete with wires and slow-motion effects.


The method of recording the song and learning the choreography, which was by Ian Eastwood, “felt like a party the complete time,” Camacho says. “We’re joking around, we’re doing stunts. Each person was like, ‘Oh, that’s cool.’ We were all backing each other up.”


And just as they’re broadening their horizons to work with other groups, they’re becoming a more closesly knit crew themselves. “Every single day, we’re learning about each other,” Vélez says, pointing in particular to how they’ll some days discover the way the same words are used differently across Latinx cultures. “Some random words mean something different in different places, or perhaps don’t mean anything.”


“The foods, too,” Pimentel says, “And stories, and the history of each country.”


It’s in effort, Camacho adds, of celebrating their heritage collectively. “It’s bringing it all with each other, which is cool. Music brought us into one, into this world that we created by ourselves.”


Which brings us back to their global ambitions — the 2020 plans, the list of places to go, the records they still aspire to smash. The Grammy they desire to land, and the fans that they can connect with at whenever of the day or night, hopefully for the better.


“We wish to be an inspiration, more than anything,” de Jesús says. “I think that’s the reason for the music. More than just doing what we love, we desire to be a good example to follow, and make a change in our generation.”