Gen Z Makes Room for boy pablo

Visual by Olivia Tran

Move over Taylor Swift, you have reigned too long as the romance songwriter of this generation. It’s time to look outside of the country—both the genre and the US—for a new songwriter with clever lyrics and breezy harmonies, which perfectly describe young love in the current era. 

Nicolás Pablo Rivera Muñoz is the son of two Chilean emigrants and has been writing melodramatic hits from his bedroom in Bergen, Norway, since 2015 under the name boy pablo. Muñoz is an artist for the people, as his stage name is stylized in lowercase, a trend popular amongst Generation Z who have grown up during the Internet era.

Muñoz has more than just his style choices for which to thank the Internet. In 2017, thanks to Reddit and YouTube’s algorithms, a music video Muñoz and his friends made for fun one sunny afternoon where they played one of Muñoz’s songs, “Everytime,” went viral within weeks of posting. Despite debuting the single in 2016, this video launched Muñoz and his friends into the wild life of boy pablo.

Beyond the music, many people praised Muñoz and his friends’ performances in their impromptu video. Muñoz told NME, “We drove all the instruments down by the water… it was totally spontaneous.” Muñoz said his friend Fabio, who would later become boy pablo’s manager and run 777 Records, had just bought a new camera and wanted to test it out. Bergen has a very grey and rainy climate, and on the day they drove to the water, it happened to be a rare sunny day. Threads and comments about the video poked fun at the five friends’ humorous performances as they squinted into the sun and stared directly into the low-quality camera.

Muñoz comes from a musical family and says his introduction to music was very natural. Just like his brothers, Muñoz can play multiple instruments, such as the guitar, piano, bass, and drums. He started tinkering around on GarageBand at a young age, which came in handy when it was time for Muñoz to release his self-produced first EP, Roy Pablo. While he recorded the EP on his own, Muñoz started playing shows with his friends in Norway and eventually toured Europe for two months in spring 2018. The live band consists of Munoz’s childhood friend, Gabriel, on lead guitar and his former classmates: Henrik on bass, Eric on keyboards, and Sigmund on drums. Following the European tour, boy pablo went to North America for a month in summer 2018. In October of 2018, boy pablo released their second EP, Soy Pablo.

Three years ago, no one knew who boy pablo was. In 2019, Muñoz and his friends went on to perform at Lollapalooza and Coachella. And yet, throughout this whole journey, Muñoz has remained calm and focused on his music. Behind his serenity, Muñoz still can’t believe where fame has taken him, as he shares on his Twitter at the end of the year, “a lot of crazy stuff happened this year, we played at frickin coachella.” The boys seem to be recovering from their shock to stardom and have been hinting at an album on Twitter. Through photos in the studio and tweets about writing lyrics and possible features (Tyler, The Creator?), boy pablo is telling their fans that something exciting is coming. This will be boy pablo’s debut album, and it’s already been tweeted that, “dam this album is gonna be different.”

Whether Muñoz finally learns to enjoy writing lyrics or the music videos get more planning, let’s hope boy pablo is able to keep their cool, humorous vibe as they get further outside of Norway.