Residente Discusses His New Album ‘Las Letras No Importan’

Shortly after his friend Valentina Gasparini passed away, Residente began seeing the number “313” everywhere. 

He’d been in a hotel, listening to one of Gasparini’s old voicemails, when a piano started  playing a haunting melody below him. He looked up at the clock: 3:13. Then he began clicking through audio notes Gasparini  had left him ​— she’d been an accomplished violinist and they’d collaborated on a lot of music together. The last one she’d sent him had been at 3:13 p.m. He’d responded with a message that was 3:13 minutes. There were other coincidences, some too personal and peculiar for him to mention now, but the number suddenly seemed to mean something bigger.

“I tend not to believe in things that are very spiritual or magical in that sense. I’m a ‘realist,’” he tells Rolling Stone, lifting his hands up to make finger quotes. “With everything that happens to me, there’s an explanation. But with this, it was the opposite of everything I believe in. That number started popping up a lot for a long time.”

The memory of Gasparini, and the alchemical energy that he felt surrounded this magic number, took him on what he describes as “a personal journey” to write “313.” The song is a swelling, orchestral ode to the cycles of life and a call to live in the present. It was with this song that Residente announced his long-awaited second solo album Las Letras Ya No Importan, out today. The album is Residente’s first in six years, following his self-titled LP from 2017, made after he stepped away from the influential alt-rap/reggaeton group Calle 13 with his siblings.  

Las Letras Ya No Importan has been delayed a few times. He pushed it back again last December, saying in an Instagram video that he didn’t feel right releasing music amid so much violence. “I don’t feel well. It hurts too much. I think about my son every day. I can’t be indifferent to this,” he shared at the time. 

The final product is made up of 23 tracks, and it captures a long period of time, with some songs that are almost five years old. All of it, he says, marks a big evolution for him as an artist. “I think this album is a transition into what I want to start doing ​​— and keep doing — with my music,” he says. “I have songs that are from three or four years ago that I put on here because I feel like they’re part of the process. But some of those aren’t the ones I’m the most connected to at the moment.”

Over the last couple of years, Residente has emerged as an industry pugilist, willing to fight against the commercial forces that can overpower the music scene. Occasionally, this has turned into spectacle, as it did when “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 49” with Argentine producer Bizarrap came out. The nearly-nine-minute freestyle went after Colombian artist J Balvin, who Residente had sparred with in the past. Residente admits now that some of the attention around the public feud and the freestyle took away from his other efforts, including “This Is Not America,” a heated critique of American capitalism that he released two weeks later.

“You can have 10 songs and one goes viral, and you become this banner figure for that type of content,” he says. “‘This Is Not America’ touched on issues I’ve been discussing throughout my whole career and the message was important to me. That’s not to say the song with Biza wasn’t, but ‘This Is Not America’ meant a lot to me and in a sense, the other track eclipsed the weight of it. ‘This Is Not America’ came out, but not in the same way.”

Still, some of the ideas from his freestyle ​​— authenticity in music, the divide between real artists and entertainers ​​—  reappear on Las Letras Ya No Importan. “El Malestar En La Cultura” and “Cerebro,” for example, see Residente rattling out tough, jaw-jutted bars about his skills and talent, emcee-style. A lot of songs end up as a tribute to old-school rap, with appearances from Busta Rhymes on “Cerebro” and Puerto Rican rap pioneer Vico C teaming up with hip hop legend Big Daddy Kane on “Estilo Libro.” The other features run the gamut, from Puerto Rican singer  Rauw Alejandro to Mexican star Christian Nodal.

“I love all those collaborations,” Residente says. “We made the Busta Rhymes one several years ago, before the pandemic. He called me up a few days ago when I was having dinner and said, ‘Our song is coming out!’ So what I love about this album is that  organically, it includes people who I appreciate, who appreciate me, who deserve to be there, and where there’s this mutual respect.”

Other songs capture a more introspective side of the rapper, notably “Rene,” a biographical ballad that examines depression and mental health, and “Artificial Inteligente,” which interrogates the future and the intersections of technology and humanity. He knows some of the work might be more experimental than what people are used to from him: He admits that there are times throughout his career where he had to meet fans in the middle and make music that appealed to broader crowds. These days, he’s been leaning into work that he sees as more meaningful. “Now I want to just say, ‘to hell with it,’ and keep going as far as art can take me, without being arrogant or egocentric,” he explains. “I want to keep doing that on a lot of different levels.”

He’s launched himself farther into new artistic ventures, including a starring role in Alessandra Lacorazza’s debut film In the Summers, which won this year’s U.S. Grand Prize at Sundance. Critics hailed his performance as “exceptional” and “dynamite,” though Residente claims he didn’t know how big his role was going to be at first. “I didn’t know I was the main actor until I saw the movie,” he chuckles.

He’s also working on a new script alongside Birdman screenwriter Alexander Dinelaris; when we speak over Zoom in February, Residente is at home, waiting Dinelaris to arrive so they can put the finishing touches on Porto Rico, a film about the life of the Puerto Rican revolutionary José Maldonado Román. He’s interested in doing more on the film side, and sees more acting in the future.

“With acting, you’re not so vulnerable to other people. As an artist you are, or at least, I am. I’m consistently putting real, personal things about myself at the forefront. And when you do, that’s hard. It’s hard to work on songs that are emotional, to write them. It’s intense psychological work. And it’s tiring to expose yourself so much. It’s something that can drain you,” he explains. “In acting, I feel protected to a certain extent by the role and the character. It’s not me, it’s a character. You can connect with the role and you can feel things, but people know you’re acting. The character catches all the bullets for you, at the end of the day.”

He’s been close to the film world for a long time. Most of his videos have become visually driven epics: “This Is Not America” won the Grand Prix for Music Video Excellence at the Cannes Lions Festival in 2022. Other recent videos, including “Quiero Ser Baladista,” starring Ricky Martin; “Ron En El Piso;” and “Problema Cabron” have cinematic ambitions, playing out like impressive mini movies with featured cast members and scripted scenes  For “313,” he turned to his rolodex of friends in film and asked Oscar-winning actress Penelope Cruz to read the opening lines of the song. Eventually, she also took a lead role in the video.

“A friend introduced us and invited us to a house, where I met her sons and I found out they like my music. We connected from there,” Residente remembers of their first encounter. “When I was thinking of voices to do the narration part of the song, I thought of a few people, including her, and I sent it to her to see what she’d say. I thought she was going to say no. But instead, she liked the idea and liked what I wrote, and she also had a connection to the numbers in the song.”

“313” starts the LP on an emotional note. Another powerful moment comes later, on “Bajo los Escombros,” a politically driven credo that features vocals from the Palestinian artist Amal Murkus.

“She has a spectacular voice and I worked with her while she was in Palestine — she’s still there — and I also collaborated with a group of Palestinian artists in New York and musicians in Gaza. While they were bombing Gaza, they were recording and sending the music, which is crazy, and it became a part of the album,” Residente says.

Online, Residente has continued speaking up about the crisis in Gaza, constantly sharing news and headlines about the region. (Some criticism has surfaced about a Calle 13 line from 2005 about “exploding like Palestine.”) Residente says he sees it as part of his job to stand up and share issues that he feels strongly about as an artist.

“It’s important to me, and I see it as part of an artist’s job to reflect back what affects him and not to be indifferent to what happens. We can’t be indifferent to these atrocities happening in the world. What’s happening in Gaza is horrible, and there are so many people who don’t understand, especially in the U.S. It’s crazy the way we’re looking at the genocide of thousands of children and mothers and fathers. I don’t know how you can justify it,” he says. “There’s so much of, ‘They started it.’ And of course, no one is saying what happened is right. But now they’re killing children in your face… Me, as an artist, I express myself about all of that because it affects me.”

The album shows the conscientious place he’s moving toward, and he thinks people will get an understanding of where he wants his career to move in the future. Already, it’s been 20 years since Calle 13. On “Ron En El Piso,” he raps: “I know I’m not so relevant. Before they’d ask me for photos, all devoted, now they stop me to take the photos.” It’s some self-deprecation with a side of humor, but Residente does feel himself entering a new era, one that’s not as driven by the pace of the music industry and the ambitions of an artist at the center of the scene. “I’m not going to stop making music… At a musical level, I might have my projects, but I don’t think I’ll tour a lot. Instead of 100 shows like before, maybe I’ll do like 20. I think it’s the beginning of transitioning to different things.” 

Las Letras Ya No Importan is the first step. “I hope people see this as a transitional process and that they  can identify the songs that I’m connecting with the most right now, without me having to say it. I hope they can see the differences in this project and the process of an evolution for me.”