Over impeccable jazz-funk arrangements and Latin percussion, a man in a furry blue trapper hat raps like he’s inhaled a Benson & Hedges multipack, while his partner brings lip-curling, hair-twirling attitude to his own lyrical delivery. This is Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso’s Tiny Desk Concert, an online performance that turned the two Argentine vocalists into global sensations almost overnight after it came out last October. It has now racked up 36m views and Rolling Stone has called them “the future of music”.
Some eyebrows were raised, though, by the English translations of their lyrics: crude, daft, often hilarious tales of parties, sex and girls – even, accidentally, goes one punchline, the same one. “We’re always having fun and trying to confuse people,” Amoroso explains on a video call from Madrid, during a 53-date tour that includes London, Glastonbury and Japan’s Fuji Rock. “Yesss, confuse!” his co-pilot pipes up, impishly. “Our life is like a TV show and we change in every episode. We have our meloso [schmaltz], our punky side, our rapper side.”
