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Music

Latin Pop Star Juanes Has Hopped on the EDM Train and It's Not That Bad

Cedric Gervais be like, YOLO, Juanes.
Rukes

Even the biggest fans of both dance music and Latin pop didn't see the curveball coming that Cedric Gervais threw at Sunset Music Festival in Tampa last Saturday.

It's not fake and it's not a joke, Colombian singer and 20-time Latin Grammy award-winner Juanes actually has just collaborated on a track with Grammy award-winner, Cedric Gervais, best known recently for his tune "Molly" and his reworks of Lana Del Rey's "Summertime Sadness" and "Young and Beautiful." "Este Amor" is filled with Juanes's own style, both in the lyrics and execution, and a very melodic EDM topline, full of drops and synths injected with energy. At a first listen it might not grab you, but consider it an acquired taste. The songwriting here is strong.

It's not really a novelty for charming Latin pop singers to get together with foreign producers to create electronic music in Spanish; that has been happening for decades now. The most interesting thing, at least for me, is how this will build a bridge for the voices of singers, such as Juanes, to find an opportunity in the market of big festivals. It makes sense when we see that Usher, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande and Selena Gomez have done this recently. We could say, "of course, but they're English-speaking singers", but a bridge between Latin pop and foreign pop hasn't existed.

The track has not been formally released (the video above is probably the most complete of any online) but it has been embraced by a crowd in one of the most incendiary of places: an EDM festival. Miami-based, French-born Gervais, without a hit track since his Grammy win in early 2014, can now reach a whole new audience through this collaboration, and possibly a new level of success.

I am intrigued as to what is to come in the future of this decade.

Trino Trevino is the editor of THUMP Español. He is on Twitter.