The night of Oct. 20, 2024, was full of firsts for Xavi. The 20-year-old Mexican American ­singer-songwriter gave his first televised performance of his breakout hit, “La Diabla,” at the Billboard Latin Music Awards, where he also won his first trophy, for artist of the year, new. And this occurred just eight days after he released his celebrated debut album, Next, which became his first top 10 on any albums chart.

“I’m still processing it,” Xavi says today. “It’s something that I didn’t really expect, but it’s a blessing. My grandpa and my whole family would always talk about this type of stuff; it was their dream to make it in the music industry. I’m really trying to push their dreams forward.”

This digital cover story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.

It was a fitting, and familiar, flurry of events for the young artist. After the August 2023 release of “La Víctima,” “La Diabla” followed in November and took off in 2024, helping maintain Xavi’s momentum and quickly establishing him as one to watch.

“La Diabla” has since tied for the second-­longest-reigning title of the year on the Hot Latin Songs chart, dominating for 14 weeks. (“La Víctima,” Xavi’s first chart entry, peaked at No. 2.) By the end of 2024, Xavi had placed nine songs on the tally while Next debuted at Nos. 6 and 9 on the Regional Mexican Albums and Top Latin Albums charts, respectively. But Xavi’s greatest accomplishment in a year of many is the spread of his hybrid subgenre: tumbados románticos.

With his pioneering blend of the musicality of corridos tumbados with the melodies of sad sierreño, Xavi has paved a clear path for himself to explore other genres, too. Growing up between Sonora, Mexico, and Phoenix, his mother would wake him up with music by Vicente Fernández and Selena, but he says coming to the United States was “a whole different world” and he quickly became a fan of artists like Justin Bieber and Daniel Caesar. Now he’s eager to explore all kinds of sounds — sometimes simultaneously.

“We’re talking about R&B, we’re talking about música mexicana. When you get all those elements and put them into one, it literally becomes its own — it brings out this new sound,” he says. “Since it’s something new and we’re getting to the bottom of it, it’s done with so much love and patience. We do it with a lot of passion.

“The studio is a kitchen, you know?” he continues. “And we’ve just been working on the sound of the fusion because there’s a lot of styles out there. But what happens when you put two, or three, or four or five genres into one song? It’s a fusion of corridos — I don’t want to say we invented it, but we definitely brought something new.”

This story appears in the Jan. 11, 2025, issue of Billboard.