Kidd Voodoo (24) reveals that when he started his life on stage, he sang looking at the floor: he was unable to lift his head and look at those in front of him.
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“It was very hard for me. At first, I sang looking down. Then my team told me ‘look forward, people have to see your face.’ Before being an artist, I didn’t have Instagram, I didn’t have Facebook, I didn’t have any published photos of myself. I’ve always been very distant from that. I’m at home, play computer games, watch TV and that’s it. Going from that to having campaigns with Adidas and having to see my face when I go out driving is a bit strange. People must be watching me everywhere,” he speculates in a Zoom conversation with Culto.
Somehow, his friction with popularity is related to his own character, to that side where he identifies as David Simón León Urbina, his real name.
“I’m a person who has never been one to make friends, I can’t talk to someone with more than three words face to face, because I can’t look at them. I’m very shy. Having to perform twelve times at an arena in Chile and having to depersonalize yourself and have ‘the biggest persona’ of your life and talk and talk, because people are going to look at you, generates a lot of anxiety. Sleepless days. But I think I’ve already overcome it,” he declares.
Indeed, the singer born in Maipú seems to have overcome those fears and had to get used more and more to looking thousands of people in the eyes.
In this decade, his figure represents one of the most explosive and rising careers in the recent Chilean music scene, with milestones such as closing the Viña Festival 2025, filling the Movistar Arena 12 times last year – surpassing Luis Miguel’s record and totaling nearly 170,000 people – and accumulating almost 7 million monthly listeners on Spotify.
His discography also shows a frantic pace, with a frequency of almost two albums per year since 2024, in a creative climb that goes from the reggaeton of Los Rompecorazones, Vol. 2, to the confessional and guitar pop of Euforia, released in May.
As the next chapter written in capital letters appears his first stadium in Santiago, when on December 7 he debuts at the Monumental, with tickets that sold out in a snap. The first option was the National Stadium, but the Ñuñoa coliseum was not available for those days.
Although he is not the first artist attached to the urban genre to reach a high-capacity venue – Cris MJ passed through the National Stadium itself last April – he does join the select group of local representatives who have landed in a space of intimidating size, for more than 40,000 people: on the list are Sol y Lluvia, Los Prisioneros, La Ley, Los Bunkers, Los Jaivas, Myriam Hernández, and Macha y El Bloque Depresivo. Only greats, only chosen ones.
-Not long ago, Chilean artists took years to reach the Viña Festival and decades to fill a stadium. Something that seems like a dream and a goal, you are achieving it in very little time. Does it scare you?
At one point, yes, I was a little scared, going from wanting all this to happen to me, the Movistars, the albums that have come out, the Viña Festival, now the Monumental Stadium. I always projected it, I was always sure it would happen to me, because I’m a person who doesn’t stop, they can knock me down a thousand times and I’ll keep looking for it. But it happens so fast that there comes a moment when I honestly didn’t know what to do anymore, I didn’t know if I should release more music, if I should just dedicate myself to singing, if I really wanted to keep pushing that hard.
“But nowadays I see it with gratitude, entering that limited list of artists who fill a stadium. I appreciate it, because Chileans have always struggled with turnout. There are very few groups in Chile’s history that have had such strong drawing power. Los Bunkers, Los Prisioneros or La Ley. Getting into that, for me, is very important.”
However, Kidd Voodoo is not satisfied. Despite the records and conquests, he knows his career is just taking off, so the ceiling is unpredictable.
“In the next five years, I would like to try to mark another milestone. The stadium thing has always caught my attention, I have in mind trying to do more than one, trying to break some barrier that hasn’t been done. Chilean artists have always done two stadiums in a row, no more, like Los Bunkers or Los Prisioneros. I would like to do three or four, just to keep helping culture keep growing.”
-I was struck that you just mentioned that when you were in the full fury of your success, you felt a bit lost, not knowing what to do. Was it hard for you to face everything you were achieving?
Yes, totally. That feeling of being overwhelmed is something I still feel. The workflow of this is very intense, because at first it’s just you, with a microphone and a computer recording you at home; and now I work with 30 people, I try to listen to everything that happens around me during the day, but it’s impossible, humanly impossible.
“Combining all that with making music, developing as an artist, seeing your family, I don’t know, more personal things of a normal person, it does overwhelm you, because you start to feel like you have no time for absolutely anything. I arrived in Chile yesterday and today I’m leaving again for three weeks. I’ve seen my family for two hours in three months. And that obviously starts to weigh on you.”
“Seeing your friends less, the people you love less, if you have a dog, a pet too, you start to feel a big disconnection, and that overwhelms a lot. It’s like: ‘wow, what I’m giving to get what I want, is it worth the price I have to pay?’ That’s the most frequent thought that comes to you.”
-And what do you answer to that?
I think it’s uncertain. It has worked for me, yes. Obviously, it’s painful not to be with so many people I love. Many people think artists work little or don’t know what one does. But you have to sacrifice a lot, you know?
“For me the price is quite high, but I do think it will be worth it. I think at some point I’ll have a real moment to rest and get away a bit from what music is.”
Perhaps unintentionally, almost by generational synchronicity, Kidd Voodoo belongs to a current ecosystem of young artists who are not afraid to show vulnerability in front of success, knocked out by a suffocating fame amplified by social networks, admitting the possibility that a temporary break can work as a breath of fresh air, in an arc that has marked the recent trajectories of phenomena like Ariana Grande or the female group Katseye.
On a more local level, the musician is part of a community of figures that has designed another kind of urban music, more melancholic and evocative, narrating fractures, distances, and farewells without return, with a language that approaches pop, rock, and ballad.
“We never pigeonhole ourselves like that, only in urban, people should just call us artists, tomorrow we could come out with a cueca and it wouldn’t be so strange,” he bets.
-How much do you protect yourself from exposure, in terms of what you say, what you show, what you drink, etc.?
I’m a person who doesn’t give much opinion on anything. I keep a lot of what I think to myself. I don’t impose myself on other things. I mainly dedicate myself to music. Many people want to know what you think about more controversial topics. But I didn’t even see myself at 23 managing the influence I had. So, it’s complicated.
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“I don’t smoke and I don’t drink alcohol either. I’ve been clean for two years. And many people question me about it. I could perfectly be at a party here in Providencia, doing anything. But there comes a point where what I do, what I say, is replicated by many people. I started to see it in the things I wore to dress, in the way I spoke, in the way I sing my songs and I started to see people who start to replicate it, because it starts to be an example.”
“Sometimes I want to give my opinion on some things and I say ‘well, it’s my opinion, it’s not everyone’s’ and I don’t realize I could mess it up. Carrying that weight has been very hard for me. I don’t post many things on my stories, because if I say anything it will be news.”
Isn’t it also complicated to keep so much opinion to yourself? Do people pressure you to speak out about current events?
Yes, yes, totally. That’s very new to me. I keep my opinion to myself and discuss it with my friends, with people, but having a position about something and saying it is something new to me.
–Does it intimidate you that there are people who dress like you?
Honestly, at first it seemed very strange to me. I’ve looked like this because I never buy clothes. Almost all the clothes I’m wearing are gifts. I dress almost like pajamas to go out. I don’t care. But when I see people on the street even with my tattoos, I think it got a bit out of my hands. But I also don’t decide what people see of me. I just play along.
-Mental health is one of the big topics among artists of your generation. Is it something you worry about talking about?
Yes, and we come back to the same thing I told you before, that I can’t do it. My personal life has been based on that (mental health) since I was a child. But I don’t air my position on it. Obviously, I give messages of support, but those messages also awaken a lot of controversy. There are people who don’t have mental health problems directly. There are people who haven’t experienced what it’s like to have depression. As there are others like me and many of my friends who have lived it, we have lived through having to leave our homes, not because we want to, but because it was already unsustainable.
“But I think mental health has killed more people than anything else. A person who gets depressed can reach a state that can harm themselves. I myself have artist friends who are no longer in this world for the same reason.”
-Does it overwhelm you when you are labeled as the most successful Chilean artist of your generation?
It’s still nice. I thank people a lot. I always wanted it really, since I make music, since I was a child. It’s been a bit hard to imagine it would be like this. I feel like more beautiful things have happened to me than I expected. It’s a bit unreal. It’s like everything is fake. Also, I feel like I still have 20 years of career left. So, I kind of say ‘okay, let’s see.’ I can achieve something more. I can reach another level. You also feel a responsibility.
“I see it a lot for my country too. Overnight, with many of my friends who sing urban music, we were the new wave of music in Chile. So, you start to feel that responsibility that we are in a race against time, to see how far I can go. And maybe that thought is a bit heavy, putting a lot of pressure on myself, but we have to take it far. That’s what I feel the most, that I have the responsibility to go far with that so that the artists who come after can run a little faster.”
If it’s about going far, Kidd Voodoo says that in recent years he has tracked the work of other adult artists to understand how they became bigger and bigger without losing relevance. For example, he says that this week he stayed up late with a cousin watching the TV special Alturas de Machu Picchu (1981), by Los Jaivas, to also understand how musical projects were managed in an era so different from the current one.
“I wanted to understand what was happening before all this. I talk to artists who are also from that era, I look for them and ask them: how did you live those years? I’m at a moment maybe where we have more freedom of expression, but there are other artists who don’t. They lived another social moment.”
-And do you imagine yourself at the age of those artists, at 40 or 50 years old?
Yes, totally. Yesterday I was watching Kanye West’s concerts, and he’s 50 years old and still filling stadiums and released two albums last year. So I say: ‘wow, why can’t I do that?’ At 50 years old, being at home, no longer going out, just joking. So, for me, I would do it, you know? For me, I would have 25 more years of career with total peace.
When projected on the calendar, the artist not only has international references. For him, Mon Laferte – who collaborates on his latest album on the track Incondicional – is another example of a path traced by effort and that has also achieved global recognition. “I’m impressed that she has such a long career and what she had to do and how things happened to her. With her specifically, I have a fixation with her career,” he comments.
But, in recent weeks, Kidd Voodoo has pushed his own foreign offensive. Between June and August, he performed about twenty dates across Europe, including Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and, above all, Spain, the second country where he has the most followers and where he hopes to establish a more permanent connection. An important part of those stops were at festivals.
And there he experienced the other shade of success. If in Chile his name is consolidated and he doesn’t need much introduction, in Europe he had to start almost from scratch, explaining his sound and his proposal, as an artist who is just taking his first steps to escape anonymity.
To temper the vertigo of an unknown itinerary, David León assures that in many points of the tour he chose to play soccer, even through apps that allow you to organize pick-up games with strangers. On a more personal level, his best friend Gabriel, part of his team and whom he met in childhood in Maipú, accompanied him on his tour.
“I had never been away from Chile for so long and much less touring. Although now in Chile I’m a moderately big artist, in Europe I don’t have much history, I don’t have more than two or three songs that are playing. I had 15 festivals where I had to break that barrier of shame again, saying my name, who I am, these are my songs, starting from zero. So that was a bit of a heavy mental process. Here in Chile I do a stadium and the reality is totally different.”
“I took my whole team, it was like the feeling of ‘here we go again.’ And at the same time it gives you the B side of this, which is a bit of tiredness too. Like ‘wow, we have to do this again.’ I don’t know if I have the same desire as five years ago, but we have to do it. It makes me a bit nostalgic, because it’s a process I thought I wouldn’t repeat. For me Chile was the whole world. So now that I’m discovering more countries, I have to do it again. Although I’m a bit tired, now I have more tools too.”
-Is it also healthy for the ego to go to places where you don’t cause the same euphoria, where you start from lower down?
Yes, it’s healthy, if you look at it from the side that growth is never a straight curve. It goes up, then down, that’s how it is. It helped me a lot, I won’t lie, it shocked me a bit, like ‘wow, I really have nothing to hold on to here, I have to prove it again.’ So, this appreciation of yours, as you call it, the ego, yes, it no longer stands out anywhere.
Have you thought about moving outside Chile, as national musicians who have succeeded abroad have done?
You know, that’s a daily question for me, with my family, with my partner, with my friends, I question it. I’ve had the good fortune that Chile embraces me a lot. So, leaving Chile, I think for now it’s not the time, but if my career started to grow a lot in another country, in another place, I could go temporarily to grow. We’ll see what all this holds for us.
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