Trueno

Mateo Palacios Corazzina never learned to stand in front of a camera at a film school or in TV dressing rooms. He grew up behind the scenes of the community theater group Catalinas Sur, in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of La Boca, watching his father perform for working-class neighbors. There he understood that stepping onto a stage demands presence, a steady delivery and a direct gaze capable of holding even the most skeptical viewer.

Nobody handed him the spotlight.

At fourteen, he was performing in the plazas of Buenos Aires, competing in improv battles with worn-out sneakers and a cheap microphone. In 2019, he won the two biggest titles on the Argentine circuit, claiming the Red Bull Batalla and the FMS professional league, but he chose to walk away from competition while he was at the top. He was seventeen years old and had an aesthetic vision that went far beyond the narrow frame of a rhymed insult fight.

Because his time in popular theater taught him that artifice without dramatic tension falls apart at the second cut.

Buenos Aires' La Boca streets as a set

His first studio album, Atrevido, was released in 2020 during the hardest months of the pandemic lockdown. The recording worked as a sonic x-ray of the tenements and corrugated-metal shacks lining the port of Buenos Aires, with a production that favored the gritty texture of asphalt over the prefabricated shine of the dance floor.

And the commercial response far exceeded any boardroom projection.

The track Mamichula passed three hundred million views on YouTube in just half a year, a staggering number for a kid who only months earlier was sleeping in a shared room. The industry tried to absorb him as one more youth draw for soft drink ads and fast-formula festivals.

But Trueno distrusted fast consumption. For his first music videos, he demanded directors who could shoot in long single takes with analog lenses, determined to give each track the visual weight of a neighborhood short film.

Political fiction and documentary archives

In 2022, he released Bien o mal, a work structured like a documentary feature film. The repertoire mixed speeches taken from sound archives, manifestos on police violence, and collaborations with folk veterans such as Víctor Heredia, blending the protest songbook of the seventies with the drum patterns of New York rap.

He had no interest in pleasing radio-format directors.

In audiovisual projects such as Tierra Zanta, he moved the shoot to Argentina's northern Andes, filming local communities with the raking light and epic scale typical of a social Western. That production earned him the Gardel de Oro in 2023, where he became the youngest winner of the highest trophy in Argentine music.

That's how he made the leap to European screens.

In 2024, Spain's public broadcaster aired the documentary series Trueno: On the Road, directed by Jaime Blanco. The cameras followed his Spanish tour while skipping the usual promotional format, capturing the physical toll on the van, backstage clashes over wardrobe and the technical loneliness of empty arenas before the lights came on.

The discipline of the close-up shot

In 2024, The DUFF came to life as a carefully crafted tribute to hip hop culture from 1970 to 2000. With the track Tranky Funky, he won the Latin Grammy for Best Urban Fusion Performance in November 2024. It was recorded without filler synthesizers and built on a dry bassline that recalled street parties in New York.

But the musician still holds onto an artisan's distrust of the corporate machine.

During the shoots for his videos, he personally reviews the digital color grading and camera framing alongside the technical operator. In 2025, his label Sur Capital Records signed independent distribution deals to ensure absolute control over the final edit of every project.

In October 2025, he wrapped up his tour in Buenos Aires with three consecutive sold-out shows for fifteen thousand people each, where the stage design relied on analog overhead spotlights, with no giant LED screens carrying advertising, and a 24-channel analog mixing console controlled the sound in the venue.