I knew it. It wasn’t accidental. The silence of Junior H—the then-adolescent from Guanajuato who arrived in Utah less than a decade ago—was not emptiness: it was a workshop. It was a chisel. It was the darkroom –where the final piece of a trilogy that began with $ad Boyz 4 Life –gave Generation Z a grammar of romantic pain.
There is no radical rupture in his new work. No manifesto. No Rosalian turn. There is continuity. Persistence. An aesthetic of the broken heart that does not heal: it displays itself.
The Sad Tumbados do not cry alone in their rooms staring at the ceiling, replaying the “I should have” and the “I shouldn’t have.” The tumbado subject goes to the club. Goes to the private room. Sits at the bar. Makes himself visible. Heartbreak is performed between mezcal shots, under purple lights, through pink powder. Pain is not hidden: it is affectively capitalized.
This is where Gael Valenzuela enters—principal songwriter and aesthetic accomplice. Valenzuela has been a key figure in shaping Junior H’s lyrical architecture, contributing to multiple tracks across the $ad Boyz 4 Life saga and to recent songs like “Mi Gata,” which had already signaled that what was coming was not a rupture, but the circular closure of a cycle. Gael doesn’t just write; he sculpts atmospheres. His pen oscillates between medieval romanticism and nightclub nihilism.
The title DEPR</3$$ED MFKZ (Depressed Mfkz) is no coincidence. It’s almost a slogan: “Yo al fondo del pozo… y váyanse a la verga, culeros” (“Me at the bottom of the pit… and fuck you all, assholes.”) It’s not victimhood. It’s wounded pride.
On the cover—two knights—Junior and Gael look as though they stepped out of a medieval miniature. There’s something of the wandering knight singing for a muse who rejects him or “tells him to fuck off.” The epic is no longer territorial; it is sentimental.
“Regetonization” and the Circular Return
If the corrido has leaned toward a “reggaetonization” of its language—as we see in Dinastía by Peso Pluma and Tito Double P—Junior H calibrates without betraying himself. Peso reunites with Junior and Gael on “Droga Letal,” where the tumbado brushes against traditional structures without fully displacing them.
The pressure is real. Suspended visas. State fines. Surveillance. The governments of Mexico and the United States tightening the screws together on corridos (of all kinds) for the first time. A political climate that has forced many artists to modulate their corrido bélico. But Junior—who had already partially stepped away from that line in previous albums—returns comfortably to his emotional territory. He doesn’t need lyrical AK-47s. Intimate devastation is enough.
The Endriago Subject in the Nightclub
Here the endriago outlaw theorized by Sayak Valencia reappears—but resignified. He is no longer the direct operator of a criminal cell; he is the consumer of excess. (Not without reason are the “s” in his titles rendered with the dollar sign—success is meant to be displayed).
But he doesn’t sing about the business; he sings about loss. The logistics of the shipment don’t matter. What matters is that the girl left him.
Necropolitical capitalism produces subjects who manage their own self-destruction as spectacle. Instead of the patrol (los patrullaje): the nightclub. Instead of the convoy: the private booth (with tusi on the side). Pain becomes symbolic merchandise. Yet within the atmosphere of consumption, both scenarios expose the subject equally.
Meanwhile, the sound continues flowing through the hard edge of tumbados: plucked acoustic guitars, bass lines marking melancholy, trombones that reopen the wound. “Mi Gata” had already anticipated that this was not a stylistic leap but the closing movement of a trilogy.
Junior H—the quiet one—doesn’t need to shout to dominate the scene. While others recalibrate, he consolidates. In the coming weeks, we’ll see which track begins to hit hardest in clubs, bars, and playlists. But one thing is clear: it will not be accidental.
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