Drake, Diplo and El Alfa are featured on the 15-track effort.
Feliz Noche Buena! Bad Bunny finally released his full-length debut, X100pre, on Christmas Eve and it’s everything you were hoping for. The Puerto Rican Latin trap rapper/singer told Billboard he was planning to finally unleash his 15-track first full album (whose name translates to an acronym for “Por Siempre” — Forever) on Christmas Eve, “Real, real, real, real, I finished the album three days ago,” the artist born Benito Antonio Martinez Ocasio said on the phone from his home in Puerto Rico. “At that point I said I wanted to release it in Christmas. I didn’t want the year to end without releasing the album. I wanted to close 2018 with it.”
The rapper said he’d been working on the project for six months, and recently finished it by wrapping the song “Como antes [As Before],’ the first track they recorded for the album. Though Bunny has established a rep as the king of the collaboration — appearing on such smashes as “Te Boté” with Ozuna and Nicky Jam and Cardi B’s “I Like It” — X100pre only has three cameos: Diplo on “200 MPH,” Drake on the recent single “Mia” and Dominican singer El Alfa on “La Romana.”
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The album opens with the urgent trap ballad “Ni Bien Ni Mal” (Not Good or Bad), on which the singer promises a departed lover that “whatever happens, I’m not going to call you,” before sliding into the Diplo-assisted “200 MPH,” which trips along on a skittery beat and lyrics about gunning a jetski and partying in the tropics. On the melancholy”¿Quien Tu Eres?,” he croons “Who are you?/ Tell me partner, who are you?/ To get close to me, who are you?,” before basically daring someone to step to him, listing off his accomplishments and warning them to ask around about him in a fierce English-language outro.
The album also includes “Caro” (Expensive), about how high-dollar Bunny’s flow is, the fiery “La Romana” with the fleet-tongued El Alfa, the new wavey, guitar-spiked “Tenemos Que Hablar” (We Need to Talk) and the broken-hearted “Solo de Mi” (Just Me), which bounces from a midtempo lost love lament to a cranked up reggaeton jam in the second half, fueled by what sounds like a child’s keyboard.
Listen to X100pre below.