I n 2022, right after he signed to Interscope, Mexican American singer Xavi was feeling on top of the world. He was 17 years old and his songs were getting some buzz, so to celebrate, he bought a Dodge SRT with his label advance. He’d been speeding down a small road in California when he suddenly lost control of the wheel and crashed, fracturing his skull and falling into a coma for days.
Xavi spent months in the hospital. “It’s a miracle to be here, man,” he says now, looking down at his hands. In addition to facial-reconstruction surgery, he had to heal from extensive injuries. A TikTok video he’s shared from that time shows him lying in a hospital bed, battered and struggling to sing with bandages all over his face and arm.
Now, at 20, Xavi feels like he got a second chance — and he’s putting everything into his music. “Sometimes I think about it and I’m like, ‘Damn, if I didn’t wake up that day, none of this would’ve happened.’ Now I fully commit, and I can’t fail.”
With his raspy vocals and slight lisp, he’s become one of the most promising artists in música mexicana over the past year. Xavi, whose real name is Joshua Xavier Gutiérrez, kicked off 2024 with a bang: His viral hit “La Diabla” soared to the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart and Spotify’s Global chart, beating out Bad Bunny and Taylor Swift. In March, he launched a 26-date tour, his first, which had him crisscross the United States. “I was not used to that shit,” he says. “Imagine waking up and going straight to soundcheck every day. You’re like, ‘Buenos días!’ ”
And this whole time, he’s been finishing his debut album, due out later this year. On his phone, he has more than 3,900 Voice Memo recordings, all early demos and ideas he’s been working on. He’s planning to include some of those on the LP, which he says is almost done. There’s “Filsofia,” where he sings to a lover he’s decided to leave: “I don’t know if it was me who caused this to die. But it wasn’t my intention,” he sings on the corrido-ballad. Another track, the aspirational “Un Toque en Particular,” features Xavi boasting about how he’s “building his empire” and “making stupid amounts of money” over the sound of tubas and trombones.
After he plays me a few songs, he says, “I’m not even capping, man: This is going to be the best, the best. It’s going to be straight corridos, respecting our style. I let go of my fucking life just to focus on this, to make the best album dedicated to one genre, and to not betray my culture.”
The music also reflects Xavi’s roots. Xavi was born in Phoenix but spent much of his childhood with his grandparents in the Mexican city of Nogales in Sonora. His grandfather, a trained saxophonist and church-choir leader, used to take Xavi and his older brother, Fabio, on long road trips and encourage them to sing church hymns while pretending they were traveling somewhere else. Xavi would always imagine he was going to Disneyland. “We’d start singing and I felt like I was there.”
Outside of music, Xavi was a “niño de la calle” who always worked hard. As a 12-year-old, he got his first job, laying cement, and remembers being paid 200 pesos (or $12) for a day of work. Then, at 15, he moved to Phoenix with his dad, an electrician who Xavi would accompany on jobs. Xavi started playing guitar, and he’d bring it with him. During breaks, he’d ask his dad to record videos of him performing. “I even had my clothes on from work [while singing] covers,” he says. “When I was questioning what the fuck I was going to do with my life, I’d be playing guitar.”
Xavi’s covers started to get attention online and caught the ears of Interscope. Eventually, the label scooped him up, impressed with his talent. After Xavi healed from the car crash, he started releasing more songs, like “Zero Sentimientos” and “Kilómetros.”
Everything fully took off in 2023, when “La Víctima” and “La Diabla” took TikTok by storm. Xavi even won the respect of Mexican superstar Peso Pluma, who actually visited him in the studio. “I was shitting bricks,” Xavi says with a laugh. After someone at the studio leaked a video of them together, fans speculated that they made music together, but Xavi shares that they only hung out. “He’s very genuine and a super cool person,” he says.
The Peso encounter is just one example of how Xavi’s young fans are constantly watching and weighing in on everything the singer does. Xavi, who prefers to stay off social media completely, is still navigating fame and the way people are constantly making up stories about his love life, with rumors even floating around that he has a secret son. He’s too focused to care. “I feel like some people post their lives and they try to fake this happiness. I don’t want to post, like, ‘Oh, guys, I’m living my best life.’ I’m not. I’m making sacrifices and trying to work on a better version of myself.”
In fact, he avoids using his phone as much as he can. “This shit is such a distraction,” he says, pointing at his phone as it buzzes. “Somebody just texted me right now, ‘How you been?’ I’m not going to open that because I don’t know who that is. That looks like a girl. I have not seen her in what, 10 years? Why the fuck am I going to answer?”
There’s tons more he wants to do. First, he wants to drop the album. He’s hoping to feature his brother, Fabio, who’s built a devoted following on TikTok and is also signed to Interscope. And there’s another collaboration he’s been dreaming about, too: He wants to work with Natanael Cano, the corridos tumbados pioneer. “He’s the reason that I make corridos tumbados today,” Xavi says. “I owe the guy a lot. It’s crazy. I have songs for him. I don’t think he knows it, but he’s literally my fucking inspiration.”
But more importantly, Xavi isn’t taking a single moment for granted. He just moved into a new house, which is adorned only with a futbolito table in the kitchen and a carne asada grill in the backyard. He’s going to try to soak it all in, because he knows what it means to feel like you can lose it all: “A near-death experience is all it takes to be like, ‘I’m going to value life more.’”
Production Credits
Photographic Assistance by Yasara Gunawardena