Argentina’s underground has long been a hotbed of unhinged creativity. It’s an ecosystem of park rap battles, parties, collectives, and young artists intentionally trying to piss off rock-loving oldheads. The trap scene evolved locally in waves: It really took off in 2017 with stars like Cazzu and Auto-Tune god Duki, a freestyler who broke through after winning the El Quinto Escalón battle rap tournament. Then, during the pandemic, the rapper Dillom co-founded RIP GANG, an essential Argentine collective with new-gen oddballs like digicore artist Saramalacara and hyper-dance princess Taichu. It’s impossible to distill the depth of the scene in a few sentences—they pull generously from genres born abroad (baile funk, drill, the mutant, multinational rush of Latin Core) and at home. Peep cumbia villera (Argentine shantytown cumbia) and the popular reggaeton hybrid it influenced, RKT, whose dirty snares and dembow sway took off after 2020 with hitmakers like L-GANTE.

In 2026, most of these artists have become the old guard. Some of them are more popular than ever, like critical darlings CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso, who took home five Latin Grammys in 2025 for their slick and fame-sick jazz rap EP PAPOTA. But over the last few years, we’ve seen the rise of an even more out-there vanguard. Boomers will drop dead when they hear PILF, the newly formed “boyband” consisting of four of the nation’s most carefree young MCs. On the dancier side, too, there’s a fleet of producers and pop girls and labels like TURRXCORE pulling the underground forward. Talking to Remezcla, the Argentine producer Heartgaze described the musical zeitgeist they’re involved in as one that stretches across multiple countries, a network of “freaky, Latino, non-binary internet music.”

Stiffy, Zell, turrobaby, and AgusFortnite2008

Broadly speaking, the Argentine underground seems to be the most experimental it’s ever been. Six Sex is straight-up moaning on the track and singing with a pilates instructor flow about how to make your ass bigger, while Stiffy raps about boom bap being “shit” and AgusFortnite2008 makes music videos that smush 1,000 browser pages into one frame. Over a crazed 24 hours last November, I hung out with the misfits of PILF and the electro-pop duo EQ. I developed a sense for how Argentina’s new vanguard sees itself, forming its peripatetic and puckish identity amid an era of global internet cross-pollination and the election of Javier Milei, a Trump-like, supposedly ultra-libertarian and anti-government figure casting a shadow over everything.

In the underground, AgusFortnite2008 tells me, it used to be uncommon to get over 300,000 plays a month. “Some 30-year-old man listens to one of my songs and kills himself. They don’t understand the distortion, the references. It’s a generational appeal,” Agus joked to me years ago. Now, a growing audience is finally starting to get it, and underground MCs regularly notch over a million plays. “There’s a lot of new people listening,” he says. “It’s like a snowball.”

It’s an unseasonably warm November day in Buenos Aires as the city edges into summer. Restaurants full of bloated loungers line the roads; the smell of grilled meat wafts in the air. I approach a black compound with large windows, guarded in front by a wall that looks faintly Japanese with long vertical slats. A key-coded door opens and I’m ushered into the studios for Dale Play, the label home to the rap group PILF. Soon, the boys arrive like they’ve just been dropped off by a parent after carpooling to a movie theater.

Zell, 20, is the most clean-cut and the only sober one, with sharp features and baggy sweatpants that swoop down to his ankles. Stiffy, 19, looks like a tourist, a camo hat across his long puffy hair and a bag strapped around his white tank top; his shorts advertise local football team Club Atlético Ferrocarril Midland. turrobaby, 18, wears a stained athletic t-shirt and ripped-apart Nike flip-flops that half-hide grimy toenails. AgusFortnite2008, 18, is the most fitted, with necklaces and snakeskin Roberto Cavalli pants that creep over his Doc Martens.

Today’s a break day in the middle of PILF’s national tour to celebrate their debut album P.I.L.F, a clown fiesta of slapstick disses and belligerent trap. The project came after 10 days cooped up in the country in an area called Chascomus. They played football and Wii, swam in the pool, and got high as shit on mushrooms. “It was like, um… you know The Beatles?” turrobaby offers. One night at 3 a.m., they walked into the woods and saw and heard what they genuinely believed was a monster. “Bwaaaooahhh,” Stiffy roars, imitating the beast. They ran like hell. Agus lost a Croc and Stiffy lost one of his shoes.

For the last couple of years, PILF’s band of pendejos atrevidos have been breaking brains across Argentina. Agus and Stiffy unload a barrage of spinbacks, drunken FX, and asphyxiated Swag! shrieks. It’s both generational and regional, the byproduct of kids nursed on YouTube poop from a country that’s historically centered rock over rap.

In person, they’re silly and chill; turro can’t stop grinning and Stiffy erupts into giggles that ricochet like tiny rubber balls. We have a live “rage-baiting” session, where they try to one-up each other in a contest to see who can make the most outrageous claim. Agus, who’s slumped beside me on a low-hanging green couch that’s seen better days, begins by saying Skrillex is better than Luis Alberto Spinetta, one of the founding fathers of Argentine rock.

Then turrobaby, sitting on a chair nearby, says that the white underground rapper Boolymon is better than 2Pac, stroking his hairless chin in thought. “Far, far better.”

“People here love Gustavo Cerati and rock idols,” he adds, “like you can’t say nothing.”

“They’re like gods. If you say something, it’s like whooaaaa,” Agus groans. “Lazer Dim is better.”

They don’t actually hate 2Pac or Argentina’s rock pantheon—the very influential Cerati, who founded the band Soda Stereo in the ‘80s, is perfectly cool to them. But inventing a weird new style sometimes requires killing your elders. “turrobaby?” AgusFortnite2008 says, smiling at his buddy across the room. “Better than Carlos Gardel.”

PILF began with just AgusFortnite2008 and Stiffy, who met online in 2020 while playing Minecraft, bonding over a love for the demented. They formed a duo, Swaggerboyz. Their early output was all Chief Keef cosplay and delicious brain poison with titles like “Jesus escucha plug.” They’ve since reached beyond their American inspo to a pulverized mash of local Argentine references and mindful provocation. They turned “montage parodies,” a 2010s style of videos madly defaced by stimuli, into a fully-fledged sonic aesthetic. The cover art of the duo’s standout 2024 tape Murio La Musica, where they rap like sleep paralysis demons spamming hook-hexes, is a picture of Beethoven shooting himself in the face.

Agus and Stiffy met turrobaby and Zell after inviting them to perform at their annual festival Swaggerpalooza. Their first song as a foursome, “BABASONICO,” distilled their modus operandi: Over a degraded flip of MexikoDro’s glittery beat for Playboi Carti’s “Money Counter,”, they rap about getting a blowjob “Babasonicos style,” a play on the famous Argentine rock band and the Spanish word for “drool.” It’s a cross-continental defacement, or a double homage, depending how you look.

turro grew up participating in rap battles in parks as a kid, but he only started making music two years ago. Zell began making music at 15 thanks to a government laptop he was given through Conectar Igualdad, a program launched in 2010 by former left-wing president Cristina Kirchner that sought to democratize access to technology across the country. That system was completely defunded and eliminated in 2024 by a Milei government that’s basically waged war against any and all cultural funding.

“Kirchner’s government used to be known for supporting national culture and young artists: we had a lot of free festivals, new cultural centers, funds for film productions,” says Antonia Kon, a music writer from Buenos Aires who works at a cultural center. Most of that is gone—and there’s a new veil of censorship, where state-owned cultural centers are now “now prohibited from approaching feminist and LGBT topics, and also speaking about the dictatorship that Argentina faced between ‘76 and ‘83.”

The result is a scattered landscape full of artists who dislike the current government but fear speaking out. Some have done so and faced consequences: The pop star Lali, an LGBTQ ally who tweeted something anti-Milei (“Que peligoroso. Que trieste” — “How dangerous, how sad”) after he won the election, was banned from performing at state-owned cultural centers, along with Maria Becerra, another leading Argentine singer who defended Lali.

PILF have gotten political in a few eye-catching instances, like on turrobaby’s early breakout jerk song “COLOMBIANA HOODTRAP,” when he shat on Javier Milei and declared he’ll fuck women best because he’s a “real Peronist,” a reference to Juan Peron, the former Argentine president popular among the working class. For the most part, the boys aim their vitriol at unnamed losers who “pee in pools,” dudes so lonely and dirty their only friend is the lice in their hair, and random celebrities (Lil Tecca and Edgar Allen Poe catch strays in Stiffy’s madcap mixtape HACELOS CONCHA STIFFY).

Kon thinks their music reflects a hypersaturated and “cynical, unhopeful” generation. “Their lyrics are satirizing the first generation of trap stars’ fixation with accumulating capital and bragging about drugs and sex,” she says. “A lot of rock critics here in Argentina believe that it’s shallow that the trap scene became so big—and not a more explicitly ‘political’ music scene I guess—but for me it’s the total opposite.”

She understands why youth uncertainty would manifest in this kind of ignorant-aspirational music against the backdrop of Argentina’s recent recession and hyperinflation. “They dream of becoming big trap artists or streamers and making money because it’s so hard to dream of socially ascending here—it’s almost impossible.”

Perhaps part of the reason the PILF boys trash Argentina’s legends is projection, and secretly a wish to restore the country to what it was like when they were younger, when government funding of the arts was abundant and everyone was more united under a monoculture. “It’s a culture that’s lost in the years,” Agus laments, speaking yearningly of an era when there were genuine bands; it’s why they decided to call themselves a “band” and not a collective. Stiffy grew up admiring the punk band Flema, playing in a folk orchestra in the hood in Morón and busking on the guitar in Plaza Francia, a public square near the water in the barrio of Recoleta.

Like many choices the band makes, their name came haphazardly: They took one of their perennial crude obsessions, MILFs, and changed “moms” to “pendejos,” idiots. (In what may be a shocking blindside to fans, Stiffy, after penning countless odes to hot mothers, announces on PILF’s debut album that he’s done with them and only interested in models now.)

The pubescent dumbass spirit is baked into PILF’s art. During one show at Teatro Opera in La Plata, Agus accidentally elbowed Stiffy in the face until he started bleeding everywhere; Zell shows me a picture of a paper setlist stained with Stiffy’s blood. They tell me about the making of the video for lead single “HIT,” a raucous bender of woodwind trap, which involved them trashing a staged wedding reception and, in the process, tarnishing their industry cred. “The production [team] hated us,” turrobaby laughs. “They told us not to break things, objects. Glasses, plates. When I was trying to step on the table, I was kicking everything.”

“People were crying, it was a mess,” Agus adds matter-of-factly. “We are struggling with the next video because of that. But we’re still going to make it.” They all start talking about their dream video ideas. Agus wants “50 seconds in the Pyramids, 50 seconds in Paris, in Malaysia, in Japan.” Stiffy wants a stop-motion animation. Zell wants his own episode of a cartoon. “Or a video with, like, 1 million girls!” Agus interjects, sending the room into hysterics.

In both their sound and visuals, PILF are straining to dress their microwaved instincts with a more mainstream sensibility. The results are uneven, and sometimes generic. Judging by the unreleased music they played me in the studio, however, they’re finding a way to elevate their psycho impulses to arena grandeur. One track juddered with extreme vibrato; another was a feverish collaboration between Zell and boolymon, with a “ZELL Y BOOLYMON” hook that tore out of the speakers like a neon claw. They’re working on a tune with the tantalizingly trembly enzocerobulto, the “GOAT of the Argentina underground” per turro, and would like to collaborate with Modo Diablo, the trio of Duki, Neo Pistea, and YSY A. “That would be the only PILF fit—or a Korean band, like BTS,” Agus says. Agus and Stiffy aren’t done with Swaggerboyz, either; they’re plotting a new tape all about them growing up.

It’s impressive how influential these four dropouts have managed to become at their age. Fans swarm PILF shows with bandanas and long hair like Agus and Stiffy. turro recently returned to his school, the one he not too long ago dropped out of, to talk about his career, and claimed the kids were fitted like them.

“We are like heroes in the underground,” Zell tells me proudly. “It’s beautiful that people are dressing like us.” “It’s like you are looking like yourself, but young,” Agus adds. I mentioned “Swaggerboyz” to dozens of people on my trip, and everyone was amused—either they loved them or thought they were clowns. But everyone knew them.

I asked PILF what their families think of their rise.

“My mom is my number one fan,” Zell says with a sheepish expression.

“My mom is also my fan,” turro smirks. I later learn that turrobaby is the son of the poet Cecilia Pavón. Only a few years ago, turro was writing political analysis about the conditions that led to Milei and literary criticism for the magazine Revista Jennifer. His turn from culture critic to trashy rotslop rapper broke my brain a little, but he acts like his path was destiny.

At the end of our convo, we spill out into a rocky little patio-garage with a motorcycle, the boys posing for photos and passing a joint. For now, it’s time to eat asado and bounce to the tour van.

Twelve hours earlier, late afternoon, I’m sitting around a table with Candela Mattera and Laura Ferreira, who make dance pop as EQ. While their music couldn’t be further from the profane filth of PILF, both groups are linked inside the incestuous ouroboros of this local and global, increasingly country- and genre-hybridized underground. They’ve been to each other’s shows and they’re friends, both groups coming up in Buenos Aires’ post-COVID milieu.

Ferreira wears a funereal black hat gifted from her mother, a black graphic top, and a patchwork skirt with a chunky belt. Mattera’s also in all-black with a Betty-Boop-themed motorcyclist purse. We’re at the pretty and pastel Merienda Cafe in the Palermo Soho neighborhood in the north of Buenos Aires. The waitress gives us impossibly huge menus that look like brochures for a Great Gatsby weekend getaway package.

Qiri

Estratosfera and Qiri

Politics come up a lot faster in this conversation, as EQ describes how they think the current underground Buenos Aires scene has diminished slightly compared to that thrilling moment a few years ago. “Our president Javier Milei, that fucking fascist, he won,” Ferreira shoots. “I think a lot of cultural paradigms [here have] shifted to the right. As soon as he won, a lot of venues got shut down.” They pointed to the venue Maquinal as a frequent target of police raids and shutdowns. They were supposed to DJ at another venue for Pride, but it got shut down last minute.

Like any major city, Buenos Aires has a network of venues. Among them is Local Support in Palermo, which Agus described to me as for the “starter underground.” “You know Pokémon? That’s like the lobby when you spawn,” he explained. There’s also the popular Niceto Club, a pit stop for every rising artist in the scene. Despite the political and economic situation, the city seems to be a fizzling motherboard of activity, with a host of gender- and genre-oscillating underground parties like Popperazo! and Kioskera.

EQ met online, during COVID, amid what Mattera describes as the worst year of her life. At one point, she tried to learn skateboarding and had an accident that required cold metal rods be inserted into her wrists. “I thought she tried to kill herself when she posted that, I was like, what the fuck?” Ferreira says. “I was milking that shit online,” Mattera giggles. “I was always quoting the Bladee lyric, ‘I broke my wrist, I gotta ice it.’ That was my shit.” They didn’t meet in person until 2021, at a Halloween show, where Mattera dressed as a juggalo and Ferreira a vampire.

Like PILF, their music doesn’t rage violently against the machine. But instead of the vulgar pleasures of blown-out bass and MILF worship, EQ opt for delicate club distraction. They tingle the cochlear nerves with ringlets of ASMR vocals and tasteful sub-bass. And unlike PILF, EQ are bigger abroad than at home; they’ve made music with the Canadian producer CFCF and the British club pop darling Shygirl. “Boytoy,” one of the most shivery-sexy songs of 2024, unfurls like a finger tracing the nape of your neck. Ferreira, who performs as Estratosfera (the “E” to Mattera’s “Q,” Qiri), sings about the zygote stage of a relationship when everything’s red-hot with possibility. That was the first song they made, and it became the opener for their self-titled debut EP.

Mattera has been playing music her whole life, singing “when I was wearing diapers, basically,” and taking classical opera singing and piano lessons. She studied electroacoustic experimental composition at the National University of Arts for six years, before dropping out. Ferreira also gave the National University of Arts a shot, quitting three months in.

E and Q rolled into one partly because Ferreira wanted to learn how to produce on Ableton. Her government-subsidized laptop in high school couldn’t handle anything beyond stock plugins, but Qiri had a fully functional PC. “Boytoy” came out of a period where they’d meet up to work on music, attend parties and have sleepovers.

They’re party girls but also production nerds who know how to manipulate negative space so every bauble of bass glitters just right. “You can be a baddie or whatever, but we’re also the brains,” Ferreira elaborates. “In pop music, because of the patriarchy, the popstar is this woman that’s like an object of desire. And then the person that maybe makes most of the music is just some guy—and I hate that so much. You can tell when an instrumental is done by a woman. When I listen to New York, for example, even without their vocals, you can just tell. It was clear for us that we had to make that.”

This is deconstructed sleaze, rewiring and blurring SOPHIE and PC Music’s concepts of fake products and hyper-emotion. “I feel like someone, Getty image stunt,” Ferreira cries ecstatically on “B.S.A.S.,” imagining the act of becoming as a stock photo, a single-shot climax of airbrushed perfection. Their lyrics conjure up American frat parties spilling with Solos, but the compulsively organized, curlicue-fine music sounds like the last thing you’d hear at Alpha Delta Phi.

Their sensibility has paid off. “Boytoy” became a small hit online, escaping the confines of Argentina, and the pseudo-stock photos they made as art went viral. Because of the way the internet is baked into their sonic DNA, they feel unmoored from any specific place. “I feel more in touch with a global modern art underground scene, with people like Babymorocco and Frost Children,” Mattera says. “I feel like we have already had a little taste of everything in Buenos Aires’ local scene.”

I haven’t had a taste, though, so they agree to take me to Niceto Club in Palermo for a show by rapper-turned-synthpopper K4 and the “transfeminist noise-punk” band Blanco Teta, hosted by the indie label EQ works with, Fractura. Inside, the women seem to know everyone we pass. On the floor, hundreds of people convulse to Blanco Teta’s ravenous yowls and monster-truck basslines off their July album La debacle de las divas. Onstage, Violeta García grasps a cello striking profane sounds that do not seem like they should spawn from that gracefully curved instrument. Despite the “POR FAVOR NO FUMAR” signs, lit ends pierce the darkness everywhere.

Next, we hop in a car and head to the city center. Along the way, Ferreira and Mattera name some of their homegrown influences: Gustavo Cerati, the supernatural singer-songwriter Juana Molina and composer Daniel Melero. Mattera tells me the punk band Fun People introduced her to bilingual singing, which became a core element of EQ. We circle around the Obelisk, a skinny relic of Argentine modernism built to celebrate 400 years since the founding of Buenos Aires.

Earlier, Mattera and Ferreira reminisced on attending the first-ever Swaggerboyz show in 2022, as part of something called Schizophrenic Fest. “They literally played the tracks out of YouTube from the mixer, then their mics on top with no chain, just direct output, which was fucking hilarious. It sounded like shit, the venue was shit. There was like 100 people—crazy 16-year-olds,” Ferreira remembered. “Stiffy brought his whole family. I remember seeing his grandfather and his mom rooting for him from the crowd, it was very cute to witness,” added Mattera.

The chaotic event was personally inspiring to the duo, who had just become friends and were excited to see a new generation burst to life after COVID. In a recording online, you can see a younger Mattera bouncing gleefully with a white hat and bunny ears in the pit. The venues are bigger now, but the scene’s attitude is still as delightfully homegrown. The communal spirit hasn’t fallen apart, even as it spills across the internet and wider world.

“We’re ruining a whole generation,” AgusFortnite2008 told me, grinning. “Or saving it.”