Until April of last year, virtually no one had heard of Bad Gyal outside of Catalonia’s rap scene. Then she released her breakout song, “Pai,” an adaptation of Rihanna’s “Work,” sung in Catalan. Rihanna is one of Farelo’s idols, and “Pai,” appropriately, is mostly about getting paid and getting stoned. The title is her own invented term for money—think “pay,” but pronounced with a Spanish or Catalan accent. “I only used it because it rhymes with ‘jai’”—pronounced “high,” slang for hashish—she says, laughing. Cannabis is effectively decriminalized in Barcelona, and, like her role model, Farelo is a fan of the herb; outside the recording studio, she produces a weed grinder from her bag and meticulously rolls a long, perfectly proportioned spliff, which she proceeds to smoke in its entirety while we talk.

When she made “Pai,” Farelo was 19 and living with her parents in Vilassar de Mar, a seaside town of 20,000 people located some 40 minutes up the coast from Barcelona, studying fashion design by day and working evenings in a call center, selling car leases to local businesses. She uploaded the song to YouTube from her university’s computer network, and it was played 14,000 times in its first three days. Bloggers and Catalan radio quickly picked up on it; a month later, she appeared in La Vanguardia, one of Spain’s biggest national newspapers. She ended up dropping out of college; the videos on her YouTube channel currently total nearly 17 million plays.

Before she moved to Barcelona a year ago, she was making most of her music in her bedroom at home, using a decidedly DIY setup: To create a microphone isolation box, she lined a box with egg cartons. Some of her early songs are rough around the edges, but she made a notable step forward with “Mercadona,” a track about making money and wearing high fashion whose melancholy air cuts against its aspirational sentiment. (Its title is borrowed from a discount grocery chain whose downmarket trappings loom over the song.) The Dubbel Dutch-produced “Jacaranda” extends the vibe, its melody dripping like neon-tinted teardrops.

In Spain, critics, at least, don’t really know what to do with her. A recent story in Vogue called her a pioneer of the Spanish trap scene—a genre that she wants nothing to do with. But as much as her music tends to get tagged as dancehall, Farelo claims that it isn’t really that, either. “I listen to and love dancehall, and it’s influenced me, but I’ve also listened to things here in Spain that they don’t get in Jamaica,” she says.