Feid

Salomón Villada Hoyos spent hours in front of the monitor adjusting frame cuts before daring to put his own voice on a master track.

He was born in Medellín in 1992 to a home where his father taught visual arts and his mother worked as a child psychologist. At the University of Antioquia he learned to play the clarinet and studied Audiovisual Communication. That technical knowledge of framing and visual textures ended up being decisive.

Because nobody planned the star.

The hit factory of other people's songs

For five years he worked locked in recording booths for established names without anyone on the street recognizing his face. In 2015 he wrote Ginza for J Balvin, and the track stayed twenty-one consecutive weeks at No. 1 on Billboard's Hot Latin Songs chart. He also wrote million-selling melodies for Reykon, Nicky Jam and CNCO.

Record labels saw him as a studio craftsman. He wrote meticulously precise lyrics, but his solo debut, Así como suena, went almost unnoticed when it was released in 2017. It still lacked a story of its own.

And he decided to shake things up.

Inventing a style of his own

So he dropped the prefab formulas of Miami. Villada looked to his own neighborhood to build a recognizable visual universe, working with his sister Manuela on art direction. They made lime green an obsessive signature, dug up MiniDV magnetic tapes and revived the popular speech of Antioquia without sanding off any phonetic roughness.

In September 2022, a hacker leaked the files of his fourth album online weeks before its planned release. Feid didn't call the lawyers or postpone the campaign. He released the album on streaming platforms in the early hours under the title Feliz cumpleaños Ferxxo te pirateamos el álbum and gained 28 million streams in twenty-four hours.

The leak was his biggest move.

In 2023 he sold more than four hundred thousand tickets on a tour of large venues across America and Europe. But his cinematic drive never disappeared amid the smoke of mega concerts.

In December 2025, he screened the mid-length film XTHE ENDX in commercial cinemas in Colombia, a project shot on film that closed out his most popular creative cycle with a free-admission morning screening. To film that final sequence, the crew used a single Arri SR3 camera with a 16 mm lens and a fixed 25 mm Zeiss lens, with no digital effects added in post-production.