Duki

In 2016, the stone steps of Rivadavia Park in Buenos Aires were packed with young kids rapping out of pure rage. Mauro Ezequiel Lombardo competed without a penny in his pocket, but with a sense of tempo unusual for a twenty-year-old. When he won the seventh date of El Quinto Escalón, the prize was two hours of recording time in a modest studio.

That afternoon produced No Vendo Trap.

The track surpassed one million streams in seven days and reshuffled all his priorities. He decided not to perform at the tournament's annual final. He preferred to lock himself away to write songs with a basic sound card, homemade mixes and a dense layer of Auto-Tune.

The Antezana trenches and the raw sound

In 2017, Spanish-language trap sounded like a cheap imitation of the Atlanta productions. Lombardo, now going by the alias Duki, rented a rundown house on Antezana Street 247 together with YSY A and Neo Pistea, which they dubbed La Mansión. That living room worked as a nonstop film set, where recording sessions lasted entire days.

There he wrote She Don't Give a FO and formed the group Modo Diablo. Within twelve months he racked up hundreds of millions of streams without the backing of a major record label, distributing the tracks directly on digital platforms.

But the out-of-control pace nearly destroyed him. Medication use, chaotic tours through provincial venues and a lack of business structure pushed him to the edge of physical collapse before he turned twenty-five.

And he decided to stop the disaster.

Because he understood that glorifying self-destruction was a one-way ticket to failure. He broke with old habits, founded his own label, SSJ Records, and took over the legal management of his masters.

From the mud to the stadium stage

In 2019 he released his first studio album, Súper Sangre Joven, an uneven release that helped clear debts and experiment with pop melodies. In 2021 he refined the technical direction with Desde el fin del mundo, working with producers Asan and Yesan.

The bass hit harder and the arrangements took on a very defined orchestral texture. So the jump to large venues came from sheer popular demand.

In November 2022, he filled the Vélez Sarsfield stadium for four nights in a row, drawing 180,000 people in Buenos Aires. In December 2023, he repeated the feat with two shows at the River Plate stadium that sold out 150,000 tickets in eight hours.

The live show confirmed the scale of the project.

The Bernabéu's scale and the architecture of Ameri

In June 2024, he drew sixty-five thousand people to Madrid's Santiago Bernabéu Stadium. No solo Spanish-language trap artist had ever filled that football stadium on his own.

That night he dispensed with theatrical tricks. He set up a sober stage, a screen of massive scale and an electric band that played forty songs without long pauses.

In October 2024, he released Ameri, a fifteen-track album featuring Wiz Khalifa, Headie One, Judeline and Bizarrap. The opening track, Barro, sampled an analog Argentine rock recording that Lombardo listened to as a kid in the Almagro neighborhood.

The album racked up sixty-four million streams worldwide on its first day and was mastered at 96 kHz in a studio in Los Angeles.