Juicy Bae

A studio with friends, and then a map of cities

Cristina Vela was born in Seville in 1998 and began releasing music as Juicy BAE in 2017. There was no label apparatus behind the start: the first infrastructure was a studio she put together with friends in her home city, which is where the two halves of her material still come from — the Andalusian frame of flamenco, street culture and poetry on one side, a diet of Black American music on the other.

Staying in Seville was not an option for the kind of career she wanted. She moved to Barcelona and then Madrid to work inside the Spanish industry rather than at its edges, and spent stretches of time in Miami and Buenos Aires. That travel matters later; the Buenos Aires sessions in particular ended up determining what her second album sounded like.

She has described the period since as a slow accumulation rather than a break. Speaking to Nuebo in May 2025, she framed artistic maturity as reaching a different point of view — more information, better navigation of the game — rather than a change in what she wanted to say.

PTSD, a discarded sequel, and five years under autotune

Her debut album, PTSD, arrived in 2022 and was built around post-traumatic stress: a record of personal material delivered through trap production. It was followed in 2023 by the EP Antes de conocerte (Parte I: Premonición). A second part was written and recorded, and she threw it away on purpose rather than release it — a decision she has talked about openly since.

Across that whole run her voice sat under heavy autotune. Spanish critics writing about her 2025 pivot put the figure at more than five years of singing and rapping that way, which is the measure of how large the next change was. The processing had become the recognisable thing about her records, and removing it meant giving up the sound people identified her by.

El Secreto: two years, fifteen tracks, no safety net

El Secreto was released on 25 April 2025 on Sonido Muchacho, fifteen tracks assembled over more than two years. The decisive push came in Buenos Aires, where the producer Babyboom pressed her to use her natural voice rather than treat it. She went back to Spain and rebuilt the record around that: piano, guitar and violin instead of purely programmed beds, with the autotune reduced on some songs and taken off entirely on others.

She called it a complete before-and-after on her previous work, and an experiment — her phrasing to Vein in May 2025. The album is sequenced by contrasting energy levels rather than by narrative, cutting between aggressive and introspective passages, and it draws on trap, dancehall and flamenco without settling in any of them. Features came late, chosen song by song: Hoke, Villano Antillano, La Zowi, Abhir, Akrilla, Diego 900 and L'Haine. The Villano Antillano track surprised her most; she had never considered working with her. The Diego 900 cut started as a raw freestyle and needed substantial studio work to become a finished piece.

Reviews read the change as a gain rather than a risk: Rolling Stone en Español described less autotune, more genuine vocal presence, and melodies given room to breathe with intent. She named BITCH, 69 and ÉBANO 01 as the songs that carry the album's centre, and insisted the lyrics were not invention — everything on it based on real events.

Perreando a escondidas: a hard left, made in three months

The follow-up went in the opposite direction from El Secreto's organic instrumentation. Perreando a escondidas came out on 8 July 2026, written and finished in roughly three months, and is her first entirely reggaeton project — dembow, heavy low end, bright synths, with bachata and early-2000s Latin pop sitting underneath. The guest list is wider and more commercial than anything she has done: L0rna, Omar Montes, Kristina, Raúl Clyde and Pablo Chill-E.

Her justification for the swerve was about refusing to be managed by expectation. Taboos had to go and the work had to be enjoyable, she said on release, because otherwise everything reduces to what the market dictates. She also used the moment to state her position in Spanish rap bluntly — top three, and ahead of some of the men, which she described simply as the reality.

She does not seem to think the genre change alters how she is read. Whatever she makes, she noted, people end up considering her a rapper anyway.

The red room, the streetlamp and the band

The El Secreto tour opened at Sala But in Madrid on 7 October 2025 and ran across ten Spanish cities. The Madrid stand became the proof point: three consecutive nights, all of them sold out within 24 hours.

The staging matched the record's shift towards live instrumentation. Juicy BAE performed with a band — Sergio García on drums, Antonio Planes on guitar, Luca Knight on piano — on a red-lit set built around a streetlamp with a moon backdrop, aiming at elegance and sensuality under the pretext of a night-time meeting. The producer PMP walked on mid-set dressed as a waiter, carrying shot glasses to toast with the room. Sets mixed El Secreto material with PTSD-era songs: Por Ti, IDGAF with Villano Antillano, 69, Room 32, and CTRL as the closer, which reviewers reckoned landed harder live than on the recording.

2026 took the show out of Spain and then back into the festival circuit. The LATAM leg played Sala Metrónomo in Santiago on 16 April and the Sala del Museo del Carnaval in Montevideo on 19 April. The Spanish summer ran through Beatout in A Coruña on 21 August, Riverland at Arriondas on 22 August, the Auditorio Joaquín Sabina in Fuenlabrada on 13 September — a thirteen-song set taking in BITCH, ÉBANO 01, CTRL, Por Ti and SOLtera nunca solA — Festival•B at the Parc del Fòrum in Barcelona on 18 September, and Fleje de Flow Fest in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria on 10 and 11 October.

Standing, going into November

One date is on sale: La Riviera in Madrid on 5 November 2026, announced on 23 June 2026 and sold through her own site and Dice. It does two jobs at once — it formally closes the El Secreto tour and gives Perreando a escondidas its first proper live outing, with the mixtape's songs played in full alongside the back catalogue. Her camp has pitched it as the most ambitious show she has staged.

The scale is the point she keeps returning to. In May 2025 she said she would love to fill something big one day, and that she had never experienced the energy of a crowd above 20,000 outside a festival setting. La Riviera is not that room, but it is a step up from a three-night club residency, and it is the first time she will headline a Madrid venue of that size on the strength of two separate projects rather than one. Songkick currently lists 8,962 people taking concert alerts for her.

What is unresolved is which version of the act the next record follows. El Secreto was an argument for her unprocessed voice and a live band; Perreando a escondidas was an argument for speed, dembow and features. The November show is the first time both get played to the same room on the same night.