Give Estevie Her Cumbia Crown Now
On "Hombre Malvado," the young Mexican American cumbia-pop singer croons herself through a particularly hellacious breakup.
For some of us in the Latine diaspora, cumbia is music our parents and grandparents raised us on, the midtempo party jams that remind them of their homelands in Mexico or Colombia or Guatemala. But younger generations of musicians and DJs seem to always end up spit-shining the classics, showing respect to the music they grew up with and positioning their culture in the club with intent. As of late, no one embodies this better than Estevie, a powerhouse 21-year-old Californian with a velveteen voice.
Last year’s Cumbialicious, her first EP, combined the shuffling güiros of cumbia norteña with contemporary synth sounds and the audacity of her professed pop influences like Selena, Mariah, Britney, and La Gwen (Stefani). On that release, she was a perfect example of the way Gen Z is translating so-called “regional” Mexican genres, and a welcome woman in a landscape where the most famous of her young peers (Doble P, Nata, her collaborator Christian Nodal, her former tour mates Ivan Cornejo and Xavi) are men. On personal highlight “La Cumbia del Cucuy,” she flipped one of the scariest of Mexican folk tales into a creeping, slinking cumbia fit for Jenna Ortega’s Wednesday and tropigoths across the diaspora.
On Estevie’s latest song, “Hombre Malvado,” she takes stock of a relationship gone sour after the man in question gassed her up, stole her heart, stomped on it, and moved on. Her passionate vibrato runs show her progression, as she develops both her maturity and her voice with the command of one of the greats (Selena, of course). I could also see her evolving along the lines of beloved Mexican divas like Jenni Rivera or her inspiration, Alicia Villarreal, should she so choose. (Estevie knows the latter musician a bit—when she was a tween in the 2010s and still performing under her given name Sarah Silva, she landed second-place on the Mexican singing competition show La Academia Kids, where Villarreal was a judge.) Which is to say—Estevie’s truly got the goods.
“Hombre Malvado” builds on a sparkling prism of guitar before Estevie cuts in, asking the universal question in her silvery soprano: “¿Por qué se porta así?” (Why he acting all crazy?). Delicately, she sings the story of their tragic love on a subtle bass clip-clop, her emotion amplified with multi-tracked vocals and the daintiest bit of reverb raining down like a tear. It’s beautiful and tragic. Though she tries to defend her heart with a silver six-shooter, in the song’s video a literal cyborg boyfriend overtakes her with lasers shooting from his fists—a sci-fi take on heartbreak that feels entirely fresh. The cyborg guy was introduced in Estevie’s prior video, “Cowboy Rockstar,” which shows her building his body over lyrics about a broken man, but it seems like a theme is emerging in her new songs—the equally beautiful “Corazón Tatuado” (no cyborg), released in September, sets up her lovelorn story. Should she continue the cyborg theme in her next video, I hope she re-animates and gets his ass.
