JP Lopez has spent the better part of a decade building something that the European techno establishment didn't think was supposed to come from Medellin. As Verraco, he's constructed a sound that treats Colombian rhythm, UK bass culture, and Berlin-grade sound design as equal ingredients rather than a hierarchy. With his 2025 debut on XL Recordings, Basic Maneuvers, the argument is no longer theoretical. It's settled.
From Journalism to the Booth
Lopez studied journalism at university in Bogota before abandoning the profession to make the music he'd been writing about. My mentors in journalism gave me the tools to better understand my identity, he told Mixmag, which set me up to better conceptualize projects like Insurgentes and my work as Verraco. That intellectual rigor shows in every production decision. There are no accidents in Verraco tracks. The dembow rhythms that surface in his club sets are not nostalgic gestures. They are structural choices, load-bearing walls in architecture that also happens to make people move.
His debut album Grial in 2020 established the vocabulary: IDM textures, analogue techno warmth, and a distinctly Colombian sense of rhythmic complexity. But it was the Escandaloo EP on Blawan and Pariah's Voam label in 2023 that changed the trajectory. The three-track EP blended hardgroove, dembow, and UK soundsystem music in a way that made previous attempts at cross-pollination sound tentative. RA and Crack Magazine both named it among the year's best releases.
TraTraTrax and the Scene
As co-founder of TraTraTrax alongside Nyksan and DJ Lomalinda, Lopez helped build a label that Resident Advisor compared to this decade's Hessle Audio. The comparison makes sense structurally. Both labels operate as scenes unto themselves, curating a sonic identity that's bigger than any single artist. TraTraTrax has released music from producers across Latin America, from Bogota to Ecuador, and commissioned remixes from Pearson Sound and Perko that bridge the gap between the South American underground and the European club circuit.
The Escandaloo party series in Bogota, which Lopez runs alongside the label operation, has sold out every edition. That ground-level community infrastructure is not incidental to what the music does. The series is a testing ground, a place where the ideas in the records get verified by the bodies in the room.
Lopez has also released on Batu's Timedance label, another marker of how seriously the European underground has taken his work. Timedance sits at the intersection of grime, UK bass, and experimental club music, and releasing on it placed Verraco within a specifically British lineage that deepens the cross-cultural exchange in his work.
Basic Maneuvers
Lopez has been careful to resist the Latin club label that journalists keep trying to pin on the work. We're just focused on the next move, he says. The point isn't to represent a geography. The point is to make music that's undeniable regardless of where the passport says you're from.
The XL Recordings EP consolidates everything. The three tracks, Basic Maneuvers, Total, and sobe sobe featuring Kenyan-Ugandan rapper MC Yallah from the Nyege Nyege collective, move between hypnotic techno, bass-heavy groove, and the kind of rhythmic invention that makes you forget what time signature you're supposed to be counting. Lopez's production has never sounded more confident. The tracks are sparse where they need to be sparse, dense where density serves the dance floor, and consistently surprising without ever losing the thread.
The MC Yallah feature on sobe sobe is not a gimmick. Her affiliation with Nyege Nyege, the Kampala collective that has been one of the most significant curatorial forces in global underground electronic music over the past decade, positions the collaboration within a specific set of values: artistic seriousness, geographic decentralization, a commitment to club music that takes its cultural roots as seriously as its dance-floor function.
Where This Places Him
With Dekmantel, Berghain, and Berlin Atonal already on his CV, Verraco has built a world. Basic Maneuvers is just the latest invitation to enter it. The XL Recordings release is notable not only for the music but for what it means institutionally: a label that has put out records by Radiohead, The xx, and Vampire Weekend now considers Bogota techno worth its catalog. That institutional endorsement matters less than the music. But it names something real about where the conversation has moved.
Find Verraco on Instagram: @verraco__
