turro grew up participating in rap battles in parks as a kid, but he only started making music two years ago. Zell began making music at 15 thanks to a government laptop he was given through Conectar Igualdad, a program launched in 2010 by former left-wing president Cristina Kirchner that sought to democratize access to technology across the country. That system was completely defunded and eliminated in 2024 by a Milei government that’s basically waged war against any and all cultural funding.
“Kirchner’s government used to be known for supporting national culture and young artists: we had a lot of free festivals, new cultural centers, funds for film productions,” says Antonia Kon, a music writer from Buenos Aires who works at a cultural center. Most of that is gone—and there’s a new veil of censorship, where state-owned cultural centers are now “now prohibited from approaching feminist and LGBT topics, and also speaking about the dictatorship that Argentina faced between ‘76 and ‘83.”
The result is a scattered landscape full of artists who dislike the current government but fear speaking out. Some have done so and faced consequences: The pop star Lali, an LGBTQ ally who tweeted something anti-Milei (“Que peligoroso. Que trieste” — “How dangerous, how sad”) after he won the election, was banned from performing at state-owned cultural centers, along with Maria Becerra, another leading Argentine singer who defended Lali.
PILF have gotten political in a few eye-catching instances, like on turrobaby’s early breakout jerk song “COLOMBIANA HOODTRAP,” when he shat on Javier Milei and declared he’ll fuck women best because he’s a “real Peronist,” a reference to Juan Peron, the former Argentine president popular among the working class. For the most part, the boys aim their vitriol at unnamed losers who “pee in pools,” dudes so lonely and dirty their only friend is the lice in their hair, and random celebrities (Lil Tecca and Edgar Allen Poe catch strays in Stiffy’s madcap mixtape HACELOS CONCHA STIFFY).
Kon thinks their music reflects a hypersaturated and “cynical, unhopeful” generation. “Their lyrics are satirizing the first generation of trap stars’ fixation with accumulating capital and bragging about drugs and sex,” she says. “A lot of rock critics here in Argentina believe that it’s shallow that the trap scene became so big—and not a more explicitly ‘political’ music scene I guess—but for me it’s the total opposite.”
She understands why youth uncertainty would manifest in this kind of ignorant-aspirational music against the backdrop of Argentina’s recent recession and hyperinflation. “They dream of becoming big trap artists or streamers and making money because it’s so hard to dream of socially ascending here—it’s almost impossible.”
Perhaps part of the reason the PILF boys trash Argentina’s legends is projection, and secretly a wish to restore the country to what it was like when they were younger, when government funding of the arts was abundant and everyone was more united under a monoculture. “It’s a culture that’s lost in the years,” Agus laments, speaking yearningly of an era when there were genuine bands; it’s why they decided to call themselves a “band” and not a collective. Stiffy grew up admiring the punk band Flema, playing in a folk orchestra in the hood in Morón and busking on the guitar in Plaza Francia, a public square near the water in the barrio of Recoleta.
