Cuco

California native Cuco crafts romantic, lo-fi bedroom pop laced with wit, charm, and bilingual English-Spanish verses as a singer, songwriter, and producer. His 2016 debut mixtape Wannabewithu quickly built a passionate following, leading to an Interscope deal and broader exposure via the Billboard-charting full-length Para Mi in 2019. The more polished yet eccentric Fantasy Gateway arrived in 2022 with contributions from Mexican singer/songwriter Bratty and American country singer Kacey Musgraves. Following several independent singles, he issued the psych-infused seven-track EP Hitchhiker in November 2023.

Born Omar Banos in Hawthorne, California, he honed his skills young through exposure to Chicano rappers such as MC Magic and Baby Bash while tinkering with digital production tools. Still a high-school student, he released Wannabewithu under the Cuco moniker and cultivated a strong regional audience, especially among young Latinos. The 2017 follow-up mixtape Songs4u coincided with his shift from intimate SoCal house shows to club stages, where he sold out his first two proper venues. Blending English and Spanish vocals atop woozy synth-and-drum-machine beds, he dropped the 2018 singles “Sunnyside” and “CR-V,” both included on the May EP Chiquito. In 2019 he teamed with Dillon Francis for the standalone track “Fix Me.”

Those early recordings set the stage for his Interscope debut studio album Para Mi, released in summer 2019. It reached number six on Billboard’s Top Modern Rock/Alternative Albums chart and entered the upper half of the Billboard 200. Aside from a 2020 guest spot on Yung Gravy’s “Off the Goop,” Cuco maintained a low profile until early 2022, when he unveiled the singles “Caution” and “Time Machine.” Both tracks appeared on Fantasy Gateway that July. Venezuelan hitmaker Manuel Lara—known for work with Kali Uchis and Bad Bunny—produced the set, which featured elevated production values along with Bratty, DannyLux, and the streaming hit “Sitting in the Corner” alongside Kacey Musgraves and Adriel Favela. Further 2023 collaborations included “Si Me Voy” with the Marías and “Medusa” with Caloncho, paving the way for Hitchhiker’s November arrival, a psych-pop collection exploring mortality and life’s fragility.