Better and better: Verraco is perfecting his recipe for impactful club music

In JP López’s base of Medellín, the word ‘verraco’, often used interchangeably with ‘berraco’, has several different slang meanings depending on the context in which it’s employed. Two of its more positive interpretations, though, describe a person who displays great talent, or is significantly determined. Following a whirlwind 12 months that have seen López release standout EPs on Voam – featuring 2023 summer anthem ‘Escándaloo’ – and Timedance, and continue to establish the TraTraTrax label that he co-runs with friends Nicolás Sánchez (Nyksan) and Daniel Uribe (DJ Lomalinda) as a dominant global club music force, it’s hard to argue that he’s not living up to the connotations of his chosen moniker.

López’s journey as Verraco fully began in 2017 with the founding of the Insurgentes imprint he ran with Uribe, and his decision to quit pursuing music journalism following the completion of his university studies in Bogotá. “After going to university and doing journalism for four years, my learning curve really stopped progressing,” López says of that choice on a call from his home in Medellín. “I had never stopped making music, but my energy and focus was on my work. I owe a lot to my journalism work because, despite not having mentors in music, I did have them in journalism. The mentors I had there gave me the tools to better understand my identity, which set me up to better conceptualise projects like Insurgentes and my work as Verraco.”

First on Insurgentes came three EPs of analogue techno and electro (‘Resistir’, ‘New Army of Androgynes’ and ‘Don’t Kill’em All’) – music that López describes now as sounding “very naïve”, despite remaining proud of some of it still – before the label cast its net wider to put out records from fellow South American artists such as Argentinian Seph and Chilean Tomás Urquieta, as well as López’s debut album, the IDM-influenced ‘Grial’, in 2020. “It wasn’t until ‘Grial’ that I started to shape my sound palette and identity,” he says. “Maybe I should have waited longer to work all of that out. Speaking retrospectively, I would prefer that it was my first release, but sometimes you have to make mistakes to evolve and learn.”