Not even five minutes after landing at the airport in San Juan, the fact that Puerto Rico is the land that gave Bad Bunny to the world becomes increasingly obvious: at the souvenir shop in the terminal they are selling graphic tees printed with verses from his songs. As you leave, the feeling intensifies: on the road, songs from Debí Tirar Más Fotos are blasting out of the open windows of cars as they drive by, and in Old San Juan it’s just as easy to come across freshly painted murals bearing the artist’s image as it is to buy bootleg album merch. To be in Puerto Rico, is to feel, at all times, that Bad Bunny is nearby.
But on a random Sunday in March, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, son of Benito and Lysi, born in Bayamón and raised in Vega Baga in the northern part of Puerto Rico, is actually very close. We are on set for this photo shoot, which takes place in a spacious house, with tile floors done in the criolla style, Miami-style windows, and decorated in typical Puerto Rican fashion: with a small collection of pilones on display in the kitchen, and framed silkscreen prints of classic island images in the living room walls. In the courtyard, an iguana walks slowly under a mango tree, and in the distance, you can see the blue-green of the Atlantic Ocean.
Benito arrives, punctual, at exactly ten o’clock in the morning, wearing a camouflage print T-shirt, Sky High Farm jeans with an orange bandana in one of the back pockets, and yellow ballerina-style sneakers from his own collaboration with Adidas. Soon he can be heard singing “Amor, Amor, Amor.” A large, portable speaker playing Luis Miguel’s greatest hits accompanies the artist from room to room, which prompts an accidental karaoke as the entire crew begins to sing along. “I don’t know why, I woke up wanting to listen to Luis Miguel. On the way here I started singing just like that out of nowhere, but nobody wants to hear those songs in my voice, so I said let’s put them on,” he tells me in Spanish.
The next day we met up at Café con Ron, a cafe that Benito and his team opened in January on San Sebastian street. The place has a clubhouse vibe, with several members of his group sipping cafecitos before the interview begins. When I meet Benito, he’s uploading a story to his Instagram of some girls singing “BOKeTE” in his car. “Did you know I do my own social media?,” he asks me (Yes, of course I knew!). We’re in a lounge area in the back, sitting across from each other at a small domino table—I still regret that we did not play at least one round. He is casual, in a slightly cropped white T-shirt, baggy jeans, his Adidas sneakers, and a baseball cap with the New York Yankees insignia on it. We are three months out from the release of Debí Tirar Más Fotos, a concept album that is a love letter to Puerto Rico and its culture.
Benito recalls that before starting the project, he had already described it to his team as “an album where you’re going to miss a love but also a place.” “I had been carrying those feelings since the year I spent living in Los Angeles,” he said. Debí Tirar Más Fotos took shape almost entirely in Puerto Rico, in the final months of 2024, but it had been in gestation for longer. That January he had stayed in an apartment in Old San Juan, and had attended for the first time—since becoming Bad Bunny, the star— the Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastián, his face covered with a white T-shirt and a green bucket hat on his head. The festivities are held the third weekend in January and are the unofficial close of the Christmas season on the island. It is an atmosphere of total revelry and in the revolú, you can always find pleneros playing music and people singing and dancing around them. Not surprisingly, it was there that he wrote “NUEVAYoL,” and the little chorus “CAFé CON RON,” which he recorded with Los Pleneros de la Cresta. (At the fiestas this year, people could be heard singing “CAFé CON RON” all over the streets).
“That’s really when the project began, but by February I already had to go on tour for Nadie Sabe Lo Que Va a Pasar Mañana. I did that tour kind of not feeling it; I wanted to stay in PR to write and work these songs that I had in my head,” he adds. At the end of the tour he returned to Puerto Rico and worked on the album for three months, before having to leave again, this time for New York, to film Happy Gilmore 2 with Adam Sandler, and Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing.
“I returned to Puerto Rico in November a comerme el estudio—the album wasn’t even 80% done,” he recalls, explaining how he locked in. “All my albums I have finished the day before they come out. It’s something I’ve tried to try not to do, but it’s my way.” But his manner of working against the clock should not be confused with carelessness; Benito is an artist who works with purpose and intention in everything he does. “I’ve always had two writing processes, one is natural, with the songs that just kind of come to you; and the other is more forced, when you are working on something that you know is going to be a hit, so while you’re writing you’re thinking, Acho, people are gonna love this bit, let’s put it in.”
The success of Un Verano Sin Ti—nominated for a Grammy for album of the Year, and the first album by a Latin artist to have 10 billion streams on Spotify, as well as being the album with the most streams in 2022 and 2023, among other accolades—gave him self-confidence. “That album was the one that taught me that I really can do what I want, it wasn’t YHLQMDLG,” he explains, referring to the album Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana, which is Spanish for I do whatever I want. “Success can give you confidence, just like it can give you insecurities; it gave me a lot of confidence, but I’ve always believed more in my ideas than anything else.”
Debí Tirar Más Fotos came out at midnight on the eve of Three Kings Day. “It’s the first time I listened to one of my albums with my family on the day that it was released, because we were all together. It was so nice.” His family figures prominently on the album: in “LA MuDANZA,” Benito tells the story of how his mom and dad met (and yes, his mom cried when she heard it for the first time), while in “DtMF” he sings, “Bernie tiene el nene y Jan la nena/ Ya no estamos pa la movie y pa las cadenas/ Estamos pa las cosas que valgan la pena.” (or: “Bernie has baby boy and Jan a baby girl/ We’re no longer here for movies and for chains/ We’re here for the things that are worth something.”) Jan is Janthony Oliveras, Bad Bunny’s creative director and Benito’s friend since college; and Bernie is Benito’s middle brother, although he laughs and adds that now that his brother is a dad, they’ve “switched places.” “Bernie is the big brother and I’m the middle one.”
He continues, “My relationship with babies is… from afar, although Bernie’s baby now lets me hold him and laughs with me... but I want him to get older because my thing is telling jokes, so when he grows up we can kikiar.” Bernie has also given the 31-year-old artist an important gift—his family no longer asks him when he’s going to have kids. “At home, that conversation died the day the baby was born.” He laughs. “Bernie rompió with that, because we don’t talk about that anymore. They have a grandchild, we’re all settled, everybody’s settled.” Benito thinks for a second. “Sometimes I say yes, I would want a baby someday, but there are times when I say ‘acho no,’ I don’t know how my life would change after that.” It changes, but it stays the same, I answer. “Well, I’m afraid that it will change and stay the same.”
Benito wasn’t the only one listening to his new album as a family; within hours of its release, videos began to surface on TikTok of young fans teaching their parents salsa songs like “BAILE INoLVIDABLE” and “NUEVAYoL,” or making photo montages of their grandparents and other loved ones (both present and absent) set to the chorus of “DtMF” that goes “Debí tirar más fotos de cuando te tuve / debí darte más besos y abrazos las veces que pude,” or, “I should have taken more pictures of you when I had you / I should have kissed you and hugged you more when I had the chance.”
But as he explained, the album is about missing a person or a place, and so the “heart of the album,” as he calls it, is “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii,” a deeply emotional song with an anti-colonialist sentiment featuring Puerto Rican instruments like the güiro and the cuatro, in which Benito sings solemnly about the sale of the land and the beaches in Puerto Rico to foreigners, and urges Puerto Ricans not to “suelten la bandera ni olviden el le lo lai,” or“ let go go of the flag or forget the le lo lai”—not to forget their culture. When he’s done performing the song on NPR’s Tiny Desk, someone in the audience shouts, “Viva Puerto Rico libre!,” to which Benito repeats: “Viva Puerto Rico libre.” (Puerto Rico is currently recognized as a commonwealth, a term that camouflages its status as a colony of the United States. Puerto Ricans are US citizens and pay taxes, but those living on the island do not have the right to vote for the president of the United States.)
The song came to him in a dream. “I woke up, I remember it was two in the morning, I wrote the whole thing in the Notes app on my phone, and then I went back to sleep.” He continues, “I always felt like it was the heart of the record, which is an unbelievable thing to say when there’s so much going on around the song, but that’s where everything else starts from—even ‘EoO,’ the song that comes right after, which is a real 2000s reggaeton perreo.”
And he’s right, even though “EoO” is in many ways the polar opposite of “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii,” its presence immediately following that song somehow emphasizes that reggaeton is an important and indelible part of the culture. It is not a coincidence that after he makes you cry with “LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAii”—and for the record, I always cry—he sets off with a thunderous beat that is real hot, loud, dangerous, and de la calle, but just as important a part of our heritage as the sample of Chuíto el de Bayamón, who appears in “PIToRRO DE COCO.”
Benito affirms that he is a “tracklist maniac,” constantly revising them during the recording process; but also, more interestingly, that they function as a kind of draft for his projects: “I can show you a tracklist now for a record I haven’t even started working on yet, for a record that doesn’t exist.”
After listening to the songs for almost three months, I wonder if Benito was a star student in his Spanish class. Was it your favorite at school? He thinks about it for a while. “Ssssí. I liked Spanish class a lot, I liked writing poems, and I liked reading poems a lot more. And I say I liked it because I haven’t done it in a long time, but when I was a kid, when I was a student, I did it a lot. My Spanish teacher in 10th or 12th grade, she picked me to go to poetry declamation competitions during La Semana del Español and I was the one who represented the school in declamating poems.”
During the months he was in New York shooting his films, he also began training in earnest for the Calvin Klein campaign. “I’m not a guy who’s fit like in those photos,” he says with a laugh. “I mean, I can get fit when it’s for something, like wrestling.” The brand had made the approach two times before, but the opportunity never came with the time frame he needed. “Bro, I’m not going to get rid of esta panza in a month.” He laughs again. “I took the risk of saying yes without being ready, y fue un trabajo cabrón. Five days a week I would get up early to be on set from six in the morning until six in the evening, then I would try to get an hour and a bit to train and eat extremely healthy: a small chicken breast, drinking water and supplements, and then go to sleep. There were days when I would get pissed off, argue and say: ‘I’m not going to train!’, and I would go to my room, but then I’d regret it and just come back out and do it.” In his tight white Calvin Klein briefs, Bad Bunny joins an iconic group of celebrities who have posed the same way: Kate Moss, Mark Wahlberg (when he was Marky Mark), Michael B. Jordan, and Jeremy Allen White among them.
A little over a decade since Benito first uploaded his songs to SoundCloud, when he was still working in a supermarket, this album—and this year—feels like closing a cycle. Now he has acted in Hollywood movies, appeared on legendary TV shows like The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and Saturday Night Live, and done fashion campaigns for Gucci and Calvin Klein. Are all these things part of a vision of becoming the king of pop? Although on “NUEVAYoL,” he sings “¿Como Bad Bunny va a ser el Rey del Pop / con reggaeton y dembow?,” teasing the fact that some people might balk at the concept of him being the new king of pop, with reggaeton and dembow songs.
When I bring it up, he takes on a more humble tone. “We don’t do things with that intention, but we’re aware that they are big things. But the thing is, they couldn’t have come at a better time. That I’m doing a project that is very Puerto Rican, very heartfelt, like…” He thinks for a moment, and exhales. “I think Puerto Rico is underestimated a lot, and I think that’s what I’ve always wanted to show—like, bro, I’m Puerto Rican, I’m a jíbaro, I’m from the barrio, and cabrón, look at me in Calvin Klein. My plans were to stay here and make my record for Puerto Rico, and then Sandler calls me to do Happy Gilmore, and Darren calls me for another movie. I think it’s the result of good intentions… so things happen naturally, but in the end I guess it reflects what you’re saying, and humbly, es cabrón.”
This summer, Bad Bunny will be doing a 30-day residency of shows at the “Choliseo” in San Juan. The name? No Me Quiero Ir De Aquí.
In this story: grooming, Topher; makeup, Ybelka Hurtado; manicure, Tai Rosa; photo assistant, Saul Cedeño; fashion assistants, Brian Paulson and Julliana Hernandez; digital, Joseph Borduin; tailor, Maria Cristina; production, Lizzy Oppenheimer and Vincenzo Dimino/Petty Cash Production; local production, Javier Gamo; production assistants, Jeremy Villanueva and Edward Moya; creative consultant, Pampa Garcia; entertainment director, Sergio Kletnoy.
