Album Review: X 100PRE by Bad Bunny

In the first three years of his nascent career, Bad Bunny put out enough singles and did enough guest features to fill out several albums. As an audition for pop superstardom, it's been impressive. He can adapt to seemingly any style--trap, R&B, reggaetón, bachata, dembow--with a heavy, nasal croon perpetually drenched in Auto-Tune. He became a huge star in 2018, circumventing terrestrial radio and government censorship to become the third-most streamed artist in the world on YouTube.

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T he biggest surprise isn't so much that Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny, released his debut album on Christmas Eve with virtually no warning, but that he released a debut album at all. A musician who has thus far scored a single British hit, he has become a mainstream star in the US by avoiding albums altogether and relying instead on a mind-boggling torrent of singles. In less than two years, he's released 27 singles as lead artist and a further 37 as a guest star, a not-unappealing strategy in an industry in which hip-hop and R&B artists have taken to releasing ever-more expansive and exhausting opuses.

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