You can’t stop being true to yourself just to go global
Ahead of his London debut, Milo J talks about La Vida Era Más Corta, his latest album. Rooted in deeply personal experience and Argentine folklore, the record is now travelling far beyond the places that shaped it.
In 2021, at fourteen, Camilo Joaquín Villarruel began releasing songs he had recorded at home in Morón, west of Buenos Aires. His low register gave a distinctive weight to songs moving between rap, melodic trap and R&B. On his eighteenth birthday, he drew more than 30,000 people to his hometown stadium, just a few streets from where he grew up. Before turning twenty, he had already performed his latest album, La Vida Era Más Corta (Life Was Shorter), across two sold-out nights at Vélez Sarsfield Stadium, and brought the record to NPR’s Tiny Desk.
On the eve of his first London performance, I meet him at Sony Music’s London offices. After spending the past year returning again and again to La Vida Era Más Corta, a fifteen-track album in which bandoneons, folk rhythms and recordings of Indigenous chants sit alongside samples, synthesisers and trap beats. I arrive with more questions than our time allows. At first, he answers briefly. The conversation begins to open up when we reach an impulse that runs through the album: to place human experience at the centre of the music and draw from what he has lived and felt.
The question ‘¿Por qué no humanizarme?’ – ‘Why not humanise myself?’ – appears in ‘Solifican12’, one of the songs on La Vida Era Más Corta. Within the album, the line points to a willingness to let more of himself into the music, including what exposes or contradicts him.
‘At the moment, I have this sense that we don’t exist unless we perform ourselves. We have to attract attention somehow, beyond what we already are, beyond the deepest part of our roots. We have to stage some kind of performance to attract attention so that, if people read between the lines, our real message gets through.’
He clarifies that some artistic concepts call for that kind of construction. On La Vida Era Más Corta, however, he wanted less distance between what he presented and who he was.
‘Sometimes a concept calls for it. But on this album in particular, I think there’s a large part of me in it. Me, Camilo, more than Milo. On this album in particular, I’m a person making music, not a musician. And I don’t mind that either. I think I’m someone who has to gather experiences before I can start putting another album together. I’m someone who listens to music all the time – music people might never imagine I listen to.’
From there, he turns to the distance between a person and the image others construct of them.
‘I have this theory that I’m very different from the idealised version many fans might have of me. But that’s what this world creates: often we become more of an image than a person. Often we don’t know how to exist without performing ourselves. So I think I’d like, perhaps, to change that somehow.’
The process of making La Vida Era Más Corta began when Camilo was sixteen or seventeen and, for him, it is still not over.
‘It was a process that lasted from when I was sixteen or seventeen until now, when I’m about to turn twenty. I started it then, and I still haven’t finished putting it out there, touring it, playing it live, giving interviews about it – which, by the way, I enjoy as well. La Vida Era Más Corta really was an entire period of my life. So when people ask me what’s next, I don’t know. I need to live through things before I can know what whatever comes next will be about.’
His need to live before writing again sits alongside another part of his relationship with music, as he enjoys listening to music as much as – and sometimes more than – making it. When we return to the idea, he describes himself as a fan and, with some amusement, as ‘a bit of a geek’.
‘Liking music seems like such a simple thing, but these days not everyone who does this for a living can say the same. I think I’m a music fan. I’m genuinely interested in discovering new sounds, looking into an artist I like because I hear a song and become interested in the lyrics; finding out the lore behind that track, why they wrote it. I get really obsessed with new things that come out and with the artists I admire. As well as being an artist, perhaps I’m a fan at the same time. I’m a bit of a geek about those things.’
That interest in the story behind a song reappears when we discuss ‘Niño’. Milo had described the track as a kind of lullaby, although it could also be read as the gesture of someone addressing an earlier version of themselves with the desire to care for them. I wanted to know whom he felt he was speaking to when he wrote it.
‘In a way, I used myself as inspiration, but I developed a kind of lore or story that many people could identify with. I thought: “Right, I really want people to see themselves in this.” And what actually gives the song its meaning is the final part, when the “hijo…” — “son…” — section begins. I think that moment is what ultimately gave it meaning, and it’s really only one verse. Everything before that was more about using myself as inspiration and adding a few other things.’
Its musical form had a different origin:
‘It’s a kind of lullaby because, harmonically, the idea comes from a lullaby that Santi Alvarado had composed. Then I changed the melody, the lyrics, everything, but it was a kind of lullaby.’
Death, fear of the end and the weariness of carrying on run through several songs on the album, although Camilo approaches them without hardening his gaze. One of its starkest lines appears in ‘Cuando el agua hirviendo’: ‘Qué mal se debe estar vivo pa’ que el fin no nos asuste’ – ‘How bad must life be for the end not to frighten us?’ – He says the line existed before the song, saved out of context in his notes app.
‘I started developing the concept of “Cuando el agua hirviendo” from that idea that you’ve suffered so much that things no longer hurt. I liked that idea of: “I’ve had such a bad time that you can stab me, hit me, do whatever you like; it doesn’t even hurt, because I’ve already been hurt so much that that’s it.”’
He then returns to the image that opens the song and explains why the track appears near the end of the first of the album’s two discs:
‘Boiling water falls on you and it no longer burns; you’ve been hurt so much that you’re used to it. “Qué mal se debe estar vivo” means how badly must things be going for you not to fear the end, death, any more. Looking back through the whole album, it talks a lot about that fear of death, that fear of the end, and “Cuando el agua hirviendo” is a kind of acceptance that everything is completely fucked. And that’s why it comes almost at the end of disc one.’
The songs draw on his own experience, but their musical language comes from a far wider map of references. When we discuss the influences he incorporated more consciously, he also mentions the international artists he listens to: ‘Obviously, like everyone, we have favourite artists who might belong to the US market. I love Tyler, the Creator, for example. I love Kanye too, when he isn’t going mad. We’re not going to ignore that.’ But, he explains, every idea calls for a different sound, accompaniment and story: ‘The message I felt I needed to put out at the time came from somewhere else, with different accompaniment, a different lore. And that’s why I speak about the album with such pride.’
On La Vida Era Más Corta, those influences coexist with places, memories and musical traditions from Argentina and Latin America. The album brings together voices from different generations and scenes: Mercedes Sosa, Silvio Rodríguez, Cuti and Roberto Carabajal, Soledad, Trueno and AKRIILA. Milo has described the album as a tribute to folklore, revisiting that tradition in a language of its own.
That freedom to let each song find its own form makes the album difficult to contain within a single category.
‘I think there’s a new generation that doesn’t identify with any particular label. There isn’t a movement with a name that makes you say: “Right, that’s what I am.” And that’s great too. I think that today the media, the press and major forums have a certain need to label things, to give themselves and the public some peace of mind. I’m aware that people generally try to label things because otherwise they can’t find a place for them in their heads. But that’s precisely why I think it’s good to change that too – to make people change the way they perceive things.’
That willingness to create without first seeking a recognisable label also shapes the way Milo thinks about the circulation of his music. The album’s arrival in London raised another question: what happens when a record threaded with such specific references connects with people who share neither the language nor the places that inspired it? Does reaching them still carry pressure to translate oneself or alter how one presents oneself?
‘The truth is that going global is something you work towards yourself, but loads of things that are beyond your control come into it as well. You can’t wait to go global and stop being true to yourself in order to make it happen. You have to stand your ground with the track you have, the album you have and the message you want to put across. If it ends up going global, great; but if it doesn’t, you keep making art, you’re still an artist – you dedicate your life to that too.’
When he discusses how the album can connect with those who do not understand all its lyrics, Milo returns to sound:
‘It’s really powerful, because that’s where you also see the album’s musical richness. They might not understand all the lyrics, but there’s a feeling in the air, in the sound, as soon as you click on the song. And that makes me proud, because I know that people who might listen to it in another language or with subtitles can also be captivated by the sound, even more than by the content.’
The following evening, those songs reach a London audience for the first time at Electrowerkz in Angel. With the stage almost level with the crowd, he performs with his band only a few metres from an audience singing them back to him.
For Milo, reaching new audiences is tied to the desire to retain a voice of his own:
‘I want them to say: “This is the sound of Milo J.” And luckily, it’s an Argentine sound. In London, Argentina, Colombia, Romania, everywhere. That’s the most important thing, and what interests me. Argentine music, the Milo J genre. I want them to know that they’re listening to me, that I’m being myself.’
Perhaps that is why La Vida Era Más Corta can travel so far without ever feeling distant.
Photographer: Fernando Sanchez
Words: Gabriela Román González