Ameri, the new album by the Argentine rapper Duki, has been years in the making. Technically, it’s a world that opened up for him when he was recording his last project, 2023’s Antes de Ameri, an LP that pivoted away from the massively commercial path he’d been on since he burst onto the scene as a battle rapper and champion freestyle from the streets of Buenos Aires.
As he rose to stardom, Duki had landed massive hits alongside other Argentine stars like Nicki Nicole, Bizarrap, and Tini. But the bigger he got, the more he wanted to take things back to early in his career, when things like streaming numbers and chart records and mainstream fame seemed to matter less. “You can always have that anxiety of like, having more people listen to you, needing to break charts in this industry, needing to be number one. So, at some point, I said, ‘I want to make music that I like and that fills me up and that lets me have fun,’ and that’s what we began to do.”
On Antes de Ameri, he went back to his trap roots while experimenting with out-of-the-box production and new sounds. And then on Ameri, which came out in November, he kept going, trying to create a new universe he’d never explored before. “I tried a lot of things and I let them sit for a while to see how they felt to me. It was less being like, ‘Whoa, people are going to love this song because it has this cool element.’ It was more like trying to fill in a jigsaw puzzle and seeing what was missing,” he explains. “The whole idea emerged to make the album kind of a planet, where it has more than one biosphere and more than one climate and more than one landscapes.”
Duki says that the album’s eclecticism was also inspired by revisiting music that he thinks of as his roots: “Because I started in battle rap, I always listened to a lot of trap and rap from the U.S. and North America, and this year, I started listening to more music from the U.K. and France,” he says. “I was also listening to a lot of old music from Argentina — a lot of Virus, which is a band from the Eighties that I love, Los Abuelos de la Nada, another rock band from Argentina. And I was listening to a lot of songs that I loved as a kid and that gave me a feeling of beautiful, melancholy nostalgia.”
The result is that Ameri ended up being one of Duki’s most thoughtful projects. “For this one, we gave ourselves a lot of time,” he says. “I’m very in the moment, so it’s hard for me to make an album and hold it for a while, and then go back into the studio to re-record things, but I felt like it was worth it for this.” He centered his rap skills in several places, drawing from his extensive freestyle background. “With rap and trap, it’s a little more natural for me because I have from the world of freestyle battles and improvising, so I have a modus operandi — the more I can play around and keep a rhyme going and play with phonetics, the more I love it.”
He flexes his talent on “Wake Up & Bake Up,” a standout on the album that features two major rappers from Spanish- and English-language worlds: Puerto Rico’s reggaeton OG Arcangel and hip hop star Wiz Khalifa. Duki still can’t really believe he pulled off the collab. “Wiz had hit me up about doing a song for his album and then some months went by. Later, I was in Puerto Rico at the studio for [the music label] Rimas, and I was hanging out with Arcangel’s team and they put this song on. They were like, ‘Oh, Arcangel is on this.’ I loved it and we started dreaming about using that track for my record, and I was so excited when Arcangel agreed. And then I started dreaming again — ‘What if Wiz was on it, too?’” He talks about the experience with some incredulity, even now. “When we did the music video, the team sent me photos and I felt like I’d been edited into them,” he says, laughing.
Other songs examine the complex feelings toward fame and public life that brought Duki to his scaled back musical approach to begin with. On ‘Constelación,’ which is a song we did with Lia Kali, we had a talk about what fame is like and how sometimes when you’re hungry for something, that drive and that darkness leads to inspiration, and then once you’re in that spot, it goes away,” he says.
He’s gotten to fame, but some of the attention he gets isn’t necessarily what he signed up for; recently, his relationship with the massively famous Argentine pop star Emilia has been the subject of tabloid fodder and social media chatter, with fans constantly speculating if they’re still together or not. He won’t comment on specifics, but says he’s learned to protect his private life. “I think it’s something we all grapple with. I’ve been doing this for, like, eight years, so it’s normal that people want to know certain things, and it’s part of my job. But the truth is, it really doesn’t stress me out or give me problems. I just keep living. There’s nothing private anymore, so you have to protect your personal life and when you close the door, that’s where you know the real things and what happens. And if people talk, that’s the natural flow of the universe.”
Meanwhile, he’s happy just inhabiting Ameri – and excited to kick off a tour in support of the album. “I think every artist says this, but it does feel like each project becomes your child,” he says with a laugh. “I want to see how this one keeps growing.”