The cameras, iPhones, assistants, and Mountain Valley Spring Water glass bottles orbit him like he’s Neptune with its 16 moons. It feels like a red carpet gala arrival — but Fuerza Régida frontman Jesús Ortiz Paz is just getting to his newly built Street Mob Records offices near San Bernardino.
“What’s up, brother?” JOP says, dressed in an Oakley sweatsuit and Chanel beanie — the same look he’ll sport later while snapping sideline pics with Kendall Jenner at a soccer game. “They said you had a question for me, no?”
Yes, I’m about to ask him a few questions, and he’s also about to preview the mysterious album he’s been making for months, 111Xpantia. We weave through his new office building past his impressive car collection: several Rolls Royces, a 2021 Lamborghini SVJ, one of his first cars, a Chevy Camaro SS, and an old-school, Chevy 454 SS, because corrido pioneer “Chalino [Sanchez] always used to rock these,” Mosca, the band’s manager tells me, before JOP arrives.
We head into a darkened part of the building, styled like the album — part listening room, part underground club, with a Legends of the Hidden Temple-esque backdrop. JOP refused to send 111Xpantia out to avoid leaks, so his team asked that I come in person to hear him play me a few of the songs. (He warns the room to put their phones away: “If it gets leaked, va ‘star cabrón,” he tells the room before playing “GodFather,” on which he imagines himself as Vito Corleone.)
“This album right here, is all about making your dreams come true, bro,” says JOP. “The eye [in the artwork], it resembles manifestation. It resembles new beginnings. The 111 [angel numbers] in the name. The name Xpantia comes from the Aztecs… It’s all about manifesting.” (The word “Ixpantia” comes from the Nahuatl language, which loosely translates to “manifestar” in Spanish, “to present something to others.”)
Manifesting was big for JOP when he started his career as a barber, and later a party-thrower, before becoming one of the leading faces of the música mexicana movement, headlining arenas across the Americas. Manifesting was also big for him when he spoke to Rolling Stone in 2023, when he shared his love for Lil Baby and later brought him on to co-headline a festival with Fuerza Régida. And now, he’s manifesting for Mexican music to go global.
“We wrote [some of] the songs in Paris. This guy stayed back producing them,” he says, pointing to Moises Lopez, and referring to his trip for Fashion Week with KidSuper.
111xpantia is a sort of homecoming to a classic Fuerza Régida corrido style, while still elevating the group’s sound. For the band’s tenth album, JOP incorporated the banjo — an instrument never used in the corrido tumbado space — and synths that add a new layer to the tracks. He makes his voice extra raspy on some of the tracks. “This one, we tried to stick to the roots, but make that shit elevated,” says JOP. “This is the question I always get, ‘Where’s the old Fuerza?’ And we’re not going to do that. That stayed in 2018, 2019. We’re not going to go and redo that.”
The closest JOP gets to “old Fuerza” on the record is “Marlboro Rojo,” which he says was produced using the same instrumentation — the tuba, charchetas, guitars — as the band used on fan-favorite, “Sigo Chambeando,” from 2018.
After 2023’s Pa Las Baby’s y Belikeada and the group’s early 2024 EP Dolido Pero No Arrepentido landed the band a few chart-toppers, he decided to step completely out of the band’s comfort zone, and experimented with electronic music on what he coined “Jersey Corridos,” an experimental sound with 808s and synths over a typical corrido structure that didn’t fully land. It was all part of the plan. “We needed a little bit of a risk, like a novela. If everything’s the same, it gets boring. So I wanted a little drama,” he says of Pero No Te Enamores, which featured Afrojack and Major Lazer. “I wanted people just talking their like shit, ‘Hey, what the fuck? We lost this guy.’ I wanted that… I wanted the turbulence to hit so we could come back and do what we do.”
The new songs hear him singing about living a thug life and a lot of hip-hop-prevalent lyrical themes: partying, love, sex, chicks, and drugs. On “Ansiedad,” he sings to a girl about his struggles with love and balancing that with his life as an artist: “You want to change me/This story will never end.” The song includes a subtle sample of a live version of Vicente Fernández’s “Acá Entre Nos.” On “Tu Sancho,” he incorporates an Ellie Goulding sample that’s easy to miss. “In the hip-hop, reggaeton world, everybody uses samples, and in our genre, nobody does,” he says. “This brings the extra little sauce on the album.”
The album notably stays away from alluding to the cartel culture that he sometimes sang about in earlier records. It’s an issue that many other Mexican artists have skipped altogether: Grupo Firme, Luis R. Conriquez, and Julión Álvarez have all skipped their previous narcocorridos during live shows.
JOP avoids discussing politics, especially in the current climate. “I’m showing the roots and showing our culture. It helps without us getting too involved,” he says. “We are not political, man. We don’t talk here about presidents, none of that. I just don’t want to get involved in something que no me corresponde.”
When asked about the visa issues affecting his peers (Los Alegres del Barranco had their visa revoked just days before the interview), he steers clear: “I don’t want to get involved in no way with those things. We’ve been working our name so hard, we don’t want to,” he says. “That’s why we don’t put that in our shows or nothing like that.” He does touch on the assumptions of Mexican music’s connections to narco-culture on the new album, though. On “Ayy Weyy,” he sings, “The cops pulled up, it was in a white neighborhood/They keep fucking with us because the music’s loud. They broke our door down looking for the damn laundering/But all they found were diamond and platinum disc plaques.” (The song’s video, with clips of a SWAT team going through his house, dropped Tuesday.)
JOP would rather keep the conversation focused on the new music and how he sees the Mexican movement continuing to grow. He’ll be the first to say his group is “competing with nobody” else, since most Mexican acts are solo artists, but he’s manifesting being spoken about in the same sentences as other major stars in the American market.
“Now, we’re competing against Coldplay, those bands that are up there… Of course, we still need a lot to do and sell out in Brazil like Coldplay does,” says JOP. “That’s our whole goal, and that’s our point. To manifest being on Anglo television, to manifest being on Anglo charts, and that’s where we think we’re heading with this album… We want to be the ones, the rock stars, the crazy ones — the Beatles of this genre.”
