2021: “I don’t have dreams, I have plans. I don’t have enemies, I have fans.”
2024: “Little by little, I became my own worst enemy, searching for myself in an empty shell.”
2026: “Don’t pay anymore to watch me lie.”
Read as a sequence, these three lines could form a Buenos Aires-inspired take on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925): the tragedy of the self-made man who becomes trapped by the identity he built to save himself. Post Mortem (2021) was the coronation of a 20-year-old kid who, alongside his label Bohemian Groove, crafted himself into an abrasive rock star. Today, that persona doesn’t go out hunting for victims anymore — it feeds off its creator.
La Nueva Violencia, released Wednesday (Aug. 12) under his own independent label Bohemian Groove, is self-devouring, reflected across 13 tracks and a voice memo from his father. In it, Dillom questions the ills of contemporary society — ones he can never fully prove his innocence against.
“I feel like telling the whole world to f–k off… But I’m not going to say it.” That’s how Dylan León Masa (his real name) kicked off this cover interview with Billboard Argentina. It’s been three days since the World Cup final, but the digital world is still packed with a never-ending line of people eagerly waiting their turn to rage at Argentina with a nervous kind of fury. Once again, social media has activated its punitive function, highlighting how quick people are to point out others’ flaws while avoiding any self-reflection. “I kind of nailed the timing of the album,” he notes. In the meantime, the present moment only amplifies the meaning behind its title.
The evidence points to him, even though the responsibility belongs to everyone. The system judges him, consumes him, and then demands another season. It’s been a while since he’s been “part of the common people” (as he sings in “Gente Común”), and selling out Vélez Stadium (Estadio José Amalfitani) this past Dec. 20 only solidified that distance. The spectacle promises a movie more captivating than the plot itself. Between a flawless teaser and another viral moment online, poverty, wars, and the everyday misery of life remind us that there are still parts of reality that can’t be turned into a campaign. He wrestles with desires that his conscience objects to, but when it’s time to act, he ends up dancing in the same play.
“I’m part of the system and also a victim who gets caught up in it,” he admits, as a smile slightly distorts the juice box tattoo on his left cheek. “It’s impossible not to be, because you enjoy it,” he says.
When he thinks about his biggest enemies, his own name makes the top five. The breaking point comes when Dylan, Dillom, and the identities in between lose the distance that once allowed them to view reality as something external. His intense journey through the cadence of Buenos Aires — from his hometown of Colegiales to Villa 31, where he first cut his teeth as a producer — gave him an early awareness of social diversity. This experience intertwined with a family history that the artist has openly shared in several interviews and continues to draw from in his writing, as seen in “OPA,” his first major hit. Fame, for its part, only made his contradictions more apparent.
“I’m someone who’s very at peace with my contradictions, so I can express them,” he says now, at 25. “In fact, they really fascinate me as a source of inspiration.”
Out of that unease came La Nueva Violencia (or The New Violence). “I started feeling dizzy about the present. I’d think, ‘Man, everything’s so messed up, this can’t be real.’” The constant exposure to videos of wars, drones, propaganda, and “a ton of crappy information” began to feel like a form of siege. “Technology has changed the mechanisms of persuasion. I started finding it both horrifying and super interesting at the same time,” the artist explains. However, his critique doesn’t come from a place of moral superiority over what he’s questioning. “I don’t like hypocrisy or that moral high ground people use to attack these issues.”
Andrés CapassoResisting every temptation to conform, Dillom once again distances himself from the commercial mechanisms of the music industry to speak about what he’s going through. For instance, none of the collaborators are listed on the tracklist — not even St. Vincent, Sebastian Murphy from Viagra Boys, Declan Mehrtens of Amyl and the Sniffers, Miranda!, Juana Aguirre, Juana Rozas, Babeblade, or Terra (there’s also a hidden collaboration no one is allowed to talk about). The album cover, designed by his visual partner Noduermo (Andrés Capasso), ties the concept together: Inside a toy house, miniature dolls and a plastic showgirl display signs of a prematurely adult world, while a tiny Dylan watches through the window, contemplating his possible destiny.
With sharp, absurd and controversial lyricism, Dillom crafted an album that highlights the vices the average household swallows between the morning news and a phone propped up on a pillow. And, of course, he doesn’t leave out his own living room: women, drugs, sex, and that rock-and-roll masculinity so often sold as rebellion. He throws in “Mercado Pete” — a sexually charged play on words referencing Mercado Pago, Argentina’s popular payment platform — takes shots at “the idiots on Gran Hermano,” and imagines a kind of Shazam to identify women as if they were songs, joking that he plans to patent it.
He can shift to romance in “Souvenir,” telling a girl they still have plans to make together, “like going to a motel in General Paz,” or puff himself up in “Cocodrilo” with a line like, “I’m the star of my own stage.” After embracing a Daft Punk-inspired creed in “Nadie coge gratis” (“Nobody F–ks for free”), stepping into “the bisexual bathroom,” and greeting everyone with a casual “hola, qué tal” (“hi, how are you”), he admits he’s starting to get used to the hangovers.
The venue chosen for the first listen was Panda, the legendary studio where iconic albums like Oktubre (1986) by Patricio Rey y sus Redonditos de Ricota and Yendo de la Cama al Living (1982) by Charly García were recorded. Unlike his previous album, Por Cesárea (2024), Dillom no longer delegates conflict to a fictional construction. Speaking to a small group of journalists, the artist quickly dismissed any notion of a cohesive narrative: this wasn’t a conceptual album. What is sung and who is singing share the same wound. The misfit, the victim, the star, the mannequin and the con artist all vie for the voice; yet none of them fully claim it as their own.
Rather than autonomous characters, they are transitional positions of a consciousness that shifts masks to narrate itself. “I wanted to kill my ‘self,’ my character,” he emphasizes. This approach also involves dismantling the signature as a guarantee of meaning: “In my first album, I introduced myself as Dillom. Here, it’s simply a voice speaking to you. It could be a voice in your head or different voices from different people.” By stepping away from the center, he explains, he opened himself up to speaking from a more shared experience, less tied to the tyranny of the ego. But fame imposes its own syntax: no matter what he does, his name will always headline the sentence.
The shift toward a self-referential narrative marks the album’s biggest conceptual change, while the true innovation lies in its approach to sound. The first auditory reference point was Charli xcx’s Brat (2024). A child of the “punkdemic,” and always tuned in to the mutations of the present, Dillom saw in those synthetic psalms a way of capturing an era hurtling at full speed toward itself. “I was really struck by everything [around] it — the movement, the marketing, the release, and the success,” he says. “Then I listened to the album, and I liked it. It’s not my favorite record, but I found it super-interesting, and it felt very current.”
The music grows as the persona crumbles: “The coldness of this ultramodernity was expressed in super-digital terms, but in a way that made you want to dance — it felt like a good starting point. I thought, ‘What happens if I lean further into that? There’s a new horizon here that I can open up, and it makes a lot of sense for what I want to say,’” he explains. He adds, “I like listening to art that’s telling me something. Especially now, in a time when answers are needed. Or, if not answers — because maybe no one has them — just the feeling of not being alone.”
From the very first moments, the fiery tracks “LNV” and “Vedette” make the feverish layering of textures unmistakably clear. La Nueva Violencia creates a summit of chaos, blending post-punk, rock ‘n’ roll, electroclash, and acid house. The composition and production, spearheaded by Dillom alongside Bernardo Ferrón, Coghlan, Fermín Ugarte, Franco Dolzani, and Samuel Shea, with Santiago de Simone as mixing engineer, combine thunderous synths, Auto-Tuned vocals, abrupt tonal shifts, and artificial textures.
In certain moments, the album channels influences like Dorian Electra, Slayyyter, and Shygirl, with the spirit of Ian Dury lingering in the mix. Yet, the electronic beats soon collide with walls of distorted guitars, taut drums, drunkenly distorted basslines, and accidental recordings. The result is a psychedelic, numbing, and brutal flow — a high-speed anesthesia bomb. “It’s not like you’re listening to Hernán Cattáneo, just to be clear,” Dillom notes with a smirk.
That said, the resurgence of pop has also reached the Argentine music scene, with artists who might have rejected it years ago due to its association with mass appeal and commercialism now embracing it. Its recurrence during times of crisis seems less like a passing trend and more like a historical means of culturally processing the present. In this context, Dillom calls for “a counterculture,” and sees today’s environment as ripe for something akin to the birth of post-punk. “Everything is in place for a new movement like that to emerge, and it would be more than welcome. I hope it happens. I’m here, in case one is needed. We all want something like that to happen. We’re at a breaking point — something’s got to give, though I don’t know in which direction.”
He talks about the scene and, with a touch of irony, takes aim at a generation of artists focused on “posing.” “There’s something I really don’t like about this newer wave of artists: the grumpy face. That grumpy face really bothers me,” he says. And he adds, “It bothers me in people in general, but even more in artists. You see them all super-serious, and not even a laugh slips out.” He continues, “Today, it’s really hard to find situations where you don’t see the strings behind a performance, where something feels genuinely authentic.”
At its funniest moments, La Nueva Violencia finds Dillom as a pure comedian: from the announcement in “Superdiversion” (“Estoy a punto de envejecer/ disfrútenme, quiero estar con todas a la vez”) ( or “I’m about to grow old/ Enjoy me, I want to be with everyone at the same time”) to the final voice memo from his father, who, after watching one of his shows on TV, compares him to “an Elvis Presley about to kick the bucket.” “Ease up on the beer, or you’ll end up like me,” says Mariano Masa in a message that ended up on the album. His father will only find out about its inclusion on release day. The artist, however, claims that his weight gain was intentional — he wanted to be fat because he’s always found it funny and because many of his favorite artists are “kind of deformed.”
That devotion to imperfection also seeps into the recordings themselves. The album was made among friends, and it keeps the evidence: laughter, accidents, and jokes that no one bothered to translate for the audience. “A lot of the tracks are jokes. The whole album is basically an inside joke that maybe no one will ever understand,” Dillom says. “This is the first time I’ve left vocal takes on a record without re-recording them,” he notes. The production preserves mistakes, comments, coughs, and fragments that were originally meant as placeholders, capturing a spontaneity that couldn’t be replicated in another take.
Andrés CapassoThe album was recorded over two weeks in a suburban 1860s house repurposed as a studio. Since the songs were already finished and the demos were nearly identical to the final versions, most of the time was spent experimenting with equipment, instruments and textures. In fact, the house itself became part of the album’s sound. The unique characteristics of each room — their echoes and resonances — were captured in every track. A glimpse of this creative process was shared in a five-day livestream on his YouTube channel, building anticipation among his fans ahead of the release.
The group set a few ground rules for living together. Before recording began, everyone deleted their social media accounts and agreed not to use their phones. They also had to attend the sessions dressed in suits to give the process “more aura.” “I felt it was really important to achieve total detachment. It was a pretty crazy experiment to go 15 days without anything. It might sound silly, but we started to lose it a little,” he admits. He adds, “We spent 12 hours a day making music. It was completely exhausting and psychedelic.”
To pass the time, there were books, porn magazines — “because you have your needs,” he jokes — and, when nothing else was left, the sky. “By the last few days, we were wrecked,” he admits. “I unlocked a really great skill: I’d set up a little chair on the grass, stare at the sky and go into a trance. I could sit there for an hour and a half just thinking. Then I’d come back and ask, ‘How long was I out there?’ ‘An hour.’”
The entire process was documented through a closed-circuit surveillance system without sound recording. Dillom explains that, after about half an hour, the group stopped noticing the cameras and went about their work naturally. The footage captures the process without idealizing it. It shows musicians in the bathroom, people drinking beer, minor arguments and long stretches where nothing particularly important happens. “You listen to a song you love and think of it as something sacred,” he says. “Like you’re watching Frank Sinatra recording, or someone painting the Mona Lisa. But in reality, you’re probably just outside having a beer.” While the filming risks eroding the mythos of the work, it also dismantles the notion that an artist is always in an elevated state of artistry.
During the residency, the idea of a “future memory” emerged: living a moment with the certainty that it would one day hold a special place in your mind. Dillom admits that while he tends to forget many things, he knew those two weeks would stay with him forever. “Amigos,” the album’s final track (a raw version of which he performed during his show at Vélez), captures that feeling perfectly: “If I feel lonely, I have my co-pilot/ A partner in immortal moments I’ll always remember.” The song closes the album on an intimate note, standing in contrast to the overstimulation that dominates the rest of the record. “Ninety percent of what I do, I do to make my friends laugh — and they’re just four idiots,” he says with a grin. “It’s my grounding wire in this cold, hellish world. Those are the things that really matter.”
Returning to the city shatters the spell. On his phone, 15 days’ worth of wars, propaganda, scandals, memes and debates await him — already outdated, yet still demanding an opinion. Dylan steps back into Dillom; Dillom consumes Dylan once more, and the star returns to the stage as if he had never left.
Before wrapping up, there’s one final question: “Do you think you’re a victim or a perpetrator?”
“Both,” he replies. “But more of a victim.”
Dillom smiles, and the juice box tattoo on his cheek shifts again. Outside, the common folk are buying their tickets. And now: welcome to La Nueva Violencia.
Andrés CapassoThis interview was originally published by Billboard Argentina.