Benny Blanco is making a Spanish-language album, and honestly, it makes more sense than you'd think.
The hitmaking producer — the man behind more pop chart moments than most people have had hot dinners — has announced a new studio album called Hermoso, and he's launching it with "Joven y Salvaje", a track featuring the Spanish rapper Bb trickz. If you've not been paying attention to Bb trickz yet, that's on you. She's been quietly building one of the more interesting profiles in contemporary music over the past couple of years.
Bb Trickz Is the Right Call Here
We've been watching Bb trickz rack up the kind of co-signs that actually mean something. She appeared on Charli XCX's Brat remix album — which, if you need reminding, was one of the most talked-about records of last year. She also built a track around Clairo's "Pretty Girl", turning someone else's intimate bedroom pop into something entirely her own. More recently she's been working with Hudson Mohawke on new singles, which tells you everything about the range she's operating across. This is not an artist who ends up on projects by accident.
Benny Blanco clearly knows what he's doing here. Pairing his production instincts with someone whose whole presence feels rooted in a different sonic world to the mainstream Anglo-American machine is exactly the kind of lateral move that either looks brilliant in hindsight or baffling — and right now it looks brilliant.
What We Know About Hermoso
The album is called Hermoso — "beautiful" in Spanish — and fans have already been scouring it for clues, with some spotting what they reckon are hints at involvement from Selena Gomez. That's unconfirmed, and we're not in the business of running with speculation. What we do know is the project is being put out through Universal Music, and "Joven y Salvaje" — "young and wild", roughly — is the first proper taste of what's coming.
It's an interesting moment for Blanco as an artist in his own right. He's long been the invisible hand on other people's records, the name in the small print that explains why something sounds the way it does. Projects like this are a deliberate step into the frame rather than behind it. [The Linda Lindas recently did something similar](/getohedz/music/the-linda-lindas-announce-new-album-gotta-get-out-hear) — artists using a new album announcement as a statement of intent rather than just a product launch. There's a confidence to Hermoso before we've even heard the bulk of it.
Whether it fully lands will depend on how well the whole thing holds together. One strong single with the right feature doesn't make an album, as plenty of producers-turned-artists have found out. But the instincts shown in choosing Bb trickz suggest Blanco is thinking carefully about what this record actually is rather than just releasing a vanity project with famous names attached.
Our Take
We're genuinely curious about Hermoso, which is not something we expected to be writing. The Bb trickz feature is the smartest possible way to open this campaign — she brings credibility that Blanco can't manufacture on his own, and the pairing feels earned rather than calculated. If the rest of the album matches that judgement, this could be something worth paying proper attention to.