Villano Antillano on Her New Album and Her Move From Puerto Rico

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t’s late August, and Puerto Rican rapper Villano Antillano is relaxed in a spaghetti strap tank, makeup-less and wearing a delicate gold necklace that says “Villana,” her real name. This is who she is at heart: a laidback, private, homebody. And these days, home is on an entirely new continent.

Antillano is now living in Madrid. While she has a close group of friends in Spain, she admits the move has been tough. “I am the only one from my immediate family who has left Puerto Rico,” she says. She goes back often, but she’s honest about the issues she faced back on the island, where Puerto Rico’s water drought and blackouts make constant headlines. “Imagine after an eight- or 10-hour flight and getting home to find no electricity or running water,” Antillano says. “In a quiet moment, you sit and think: ‘Damn, why do I have to live like this? For real.’”

That question is central to Antillano’s new LP, Ante el Umbral del Peligro No Siento Temor. (“At the Threshold of Danger, I Feel No Fear.”) She embraces the pain and chaos of change as she blends trap, reggaeton, and experimental EDM. “What really inspired the album was not the act of leaving, but the woman I saw myself becoming through the process of migration,” she explains.

Produced by Spain’s Groove 2070, the album is a sonic leap for  Antillano, who released her debut La Sustancia X in 2022. “I think that’s something my other albums didn’t have: that fusion of universes between two people coming from completely different places. Before we created our first track, we didn’t know each other. We had never shared a studio. I showed up and, in five hours, we started and finished it.” While the album is mostly in Spanish, she switches easily to English throughout the album for rhymes or vibes. “It’s just a natural way of speaking for me,” she says. “ I’m very aware that I’m always operating on two channels at once.”

One standout track is “entre2AGUAS” (between two waters), a hard-hitting, futuristic reggaeton- meets-EDM song. The song’s title references her migration from Puerto Rico to Spain, but  Antillano says the lyrics  also deal directly with a breakup — “specifically, the only long-term relationship I’ve ever had,” she says. “But throughout the relationship I realized I’m the type of person who can’t let go of a goal until I feel I’ve given it everything, absolutely everything.” Whether she’s talking about her homeland or her ex, her anguish, tenderness, and relentless spirit comes through. 

Songs like “CRACK” confront violence against women and look at the experiences of trans women. “CRACK” specifically references men who claim they are “first-timers” with trans women. “They act like you’re the first, like they’ve never been attracted to a woman like you, but you have something they couldn’t ignore. But that’s a lie,” Antillano said, explaining the song. The video for “CRACK,” which dropped the same day as the album, has a trigger warning due to the extreme domestic violence it depicts. 

The song and the video are meant to highlight both the drug and domestic violence crises in Puerto Rico. “I don’t even need to get into those specific details to talk about the insane rates of violence against women in Puerto Rico. Being a Puerto Rican woman goes hand-in-hand with the knowledge that you could get killed by any of these assholes,” she says. She points out that she has also been a victim of domestic violence. In Puerto Rico, rates of intimate partner homicides and femicides are roughly double per capita compared to the mainland United States. 

As we discuss her recent life changes, and the multitude of crises in her homeland, she shares that she reached a point where nobody, not even her parents, could give her advice or comfort to help her through her difficulties. The album was her way of “alchemizing” all of the pain into something tangible: “Yes, it hurts. And yes, it scares me, but it’s not going to stop me, you know? It’s like dousing myself in gasoline and lighting a match because I have no other choice,” she says. She doesn’t fetishize the resilience she and her fellow Puerto Ricans have been forced to demonstrate as people from a colony. “There’s so much talk about decolonization, yet so little actual change.” 

In 2019, Puerto Ricans fought to oust the pro-statehood governor, only to have the same party in power ever since. Despite a major shift in the Puerto Rican vote in the 2024 gubernatorial elections, where the pro-independence candidate Juan Dalmau took over 30 percent of the vote (largely thanks to young people), the statehood party prevailed.  “Most young people [in Puerto Rico] see things clearly; we’re in a lot of pain and feel an incredible rage,” she explains. “But there’s also a sense of powerlessness.”

Now that  Antillano has made the difficult decision to leave Puerto Rico, she is putting everything into her music and processing her pain through it. Her new album shows us what that looks like: “My job is to move people. To stir up emotions — good or bad — to provoke something and wake something up inside you. To me, that’s what real music and art are: the things that grab you. But the industry doesn’t reward that,” she says. 

While Latin music (especially Puerto Rican artists, from Bad Bunny to Rauw Alejandro to Young Miko), is having such a major moment, Antillano does not think the music industry has truly changed.  Still, she is proud of the “strong presence of women” that exists against all odds.  She sees herself as part of the vanguard that has to “rise above” all the industry bullshit and “truly take a political stance” in her work regardless of the consequences.

As a Puerto Rican, queer, trans woman, her mere existence is political. And more than anything, her new album underscores her fearlessness. “What I feel is so powerful. I get up, and when I look at myself in the mirror, I realize I might not have existed — due to fear. And that, to me, is priceless.”