Picuy Soto, rapper from Saltillo, travels from the city to the mountains in his new album 'I'm not dead'

“Do what you love,” says artist and rapper Picuy Soto , who continues to explore everything he can and wants to do through art and words and now, as part of that same journey, he takes a step towards the open countryside, to the mountains, to imagine other scenarios, in his album “I'm not dead.”

The new production, which will be available on all digital platforms on March 1, is the result of a stay in Mexico City where he began to address other themes in his lyrics, including appreciation for life.

“It has more to do with nature, letting go, more hippie things. My previous albums had been very urban, with more social themes and this has more to do with introspection,” she shares in an interview with VANGUARDIA.

“It's a love album [and it's called that] because I've been very close to people who want to kill themselves and I didn't know how to express to them that living is cool, feeling, being hurt is cool. Thinking about that, I came up with the title of the album, as if giving certainty and security to whoever sings it,” he added.

Although his creative process usually starts with words—“I write all the time,” he says—and then adds music to his lyrics, this time it was the other way around. With the collaboration of visual artist and musician Adair Vigil, the music tracks were first created and from there he developed the verses.

The proposal also includes sound environments such as birds, the wind and the traffic in Saltillo and its surroundings, with the intention of “taking you from the city to the mountains and back.”

“It also has to do with a series of watercolor paintings I made in the creative process, where there are the accidental forms of nature, unlike before when I only painted random people on the street,” he says, “ I wanted to talk about that because I think that today nature, more than ever, asks to be heard and we are being heard. And it makes me laugh because it is as if I am turning into what I swore to hate, a hippie who hugs trees. But having found it is interesting to me.”

Picuy even remembers that he didn't even want to be a rapper, but rather a poet, and that during his childhood and youth he had to hide this more creative side of himself in order to fit in with his group of friends.

“All my life I have read a lot, written a lot, but in secret. I was bullied a lot for that and since I was a mess I had two lives. I would lock myself away in the summer to read a lot, imagine worlds, be silent in a corner, believe I was Tom Sawyer and suddenly go to school to cause a mess and bully someone else even though I had the same conditions to be bullied,” he commented.

The rapper questions the idea of ​​“individualism” where we are forced to be one thing, which is why he has now decided to explore what he wants, even against his own prejudices.

“That kind of awareness is only given to you by solitude, and you can find that in the mountains. It sounds super hippie, but that’s exactly what I wanted to talk about with my album. Because then I would go to the mountains, meet super elevated people, and my topic of conversation was rapper stuff. I thought I knew a lot because I knew a lot about a topic, but I didn’t know anything because I had ignored other things that I didn’t allow myself to see,” he mentions.

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And to promote the album, she will hold several launch parties, starting this Thursday, the 27th in Saltillo, then on the 28th in Monterrey, on the 29th in San Pedro and on March 3rd in Torreón, before traveling to Mexico City to continue with the announcement. In the meantime, the single of the same name can already be heard on Youtube.