The same boy from the “La Difícil” video punctuates the visuals for YHLQMDLG, and takes center stage on the album’s supernatural cover. The boy seems to represent a young Benito, though he tells me that’s not quite right. Rather, he could be pretty much any kid in the United States or Latin America in 1999: His parents fight, and he spends his days in his bedroom playing Nintendo 64 and listening to cassettes of his favorite artist: Bad Bunny. In the video for the single “Ignorantes,” the boy shaves his head to look like his hero, uncovers a third eye on his forehead, and, suddenly, he can see a better future.

“This is the album I would have wanted to make when I was 15,” Benito tells me. He thinks reggaetón as a genre is peaking commercially right now, but not necessarily creatively. “It became so pop—so pop,” he says, referencing forays by Colombian pop stars Shakira and Carlos Vives, and Mexican boy band Reik.

He attributes this dilution as one of the reasons urbano—the catch-all for reggaetón, trap, dembow, and other modern Latin genres—was snubbed at the 2019 Latin Grammys, a move driven by long-standing industry classism and racism that he protested onstage. Yet part of him understood: “Reggaetón has lost itself a little.”

A project like YHLQMDLG necessitated a sobering look to his heros. In Benito’s book, Daddy Yankee, Nicky Jam, Wisin & Yandel, and all the rest are still the masters of the genre, but he points out that once they reached maximum pop visibility in the Latin industry, they largely abandoned reggaetón’s native sound and drive. (And that doesn’t even take into account the long erasure of reggaetón’s Afro-Panamanian roots prior to its boom in Puerto Rico, or the influence of dancehall and dembow across the Caribbean on urbano writ large.)

He’s even made red caps as part of his merch that read “MAKE REGGAETÓN GREAT AGAIN,” though he hasn’t dared to wear one yet. He wants to be especially careful about how he introduces it, given the hat’s Trumpist baggage. To be clear, he’s no fan of the current administration. In 2018, he began a Tonight Show performance with a somber call-out referencing the tragic federal response to Hurricane Maria, saying, “More than 3,000 people died, and Trump’s still in denial.”

Across the new album’s ambitious 20 tracks, Benito delivers a master class in Puerto Rican reggaetón, with guest lectures from its giants and cult figures. One of his favorite tracks is “Safaera,” an intentionally over-the-top homage to horniness featuring reggaetón forefathers Ñengo Flow and Jowell & Randy, and produced by hitmaker Tainy alongside Benito’s old friend DJ Orma. The song is pure mixeo, constantly switching tempos and beats while mixing in samples used on songs like Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On” to make the existing track that much more perreo-friendly, as was the style at clubs and marquesinas throughout the mid-aughts. The mesmerizing highlight “Bichiyal” enlists Yaviah, a legendary reggaetónero who released a precious handful of songs in the mid-’90s and the decade thereafter before withdrawing from public life; Benito coaxed him back out into the light.

On “Yo Perreo Sola,” Benito foregrounds the long-relegated role of the female background singer on a track entirely about independence and consent in perreo, just one of the topics that has earned him praise for challenging urbano’s machismo on previous tracks and videos like the anti-domestic-violence “Solo de Mí” and the gender-bending “Caro.” The voice belongs to Génesis Ríos, known on YouTube as Nesi, who has been widely unknown until now. “Tranqui, yo perreo sola (Relax, I dance alone),” she asserts in a magnificent drawl, a chorus Benito knew he couldn’t sing as a man. But the moment is undercut by the fact that Ríos, the only woman featured on the album, is not credited for her performance in the tracklist, upholding a long, sexist precedent in reggaetón. At one point during his media rounds, Benito praises her voice but forgets her name.