El Fantasma

Mexican regional singer and grassroots songwriter Alexander Garcia may have assumed El Fantasma ("The Ghost") as his stage name, but his music is a rowdy uproar of flashy brass and thumping bass drums. Born in 1989 in the Durango village of San José de Cañas, he laboured as a gardener in Southern California before dropping his viral narcocorrido hit "Mi 45" in 2016. Cowboy poetry met street smarts in the brassy grooves of his debut album, Equipo Armada (Armed Team), the first of nine releases over the next four years. He ascended from underground phenom to Hot Latin Albums chart presence when 2017's Vengo a Aclarar (En Vivo) (I Come to Clarify [Live]) refocused attention on its identically titled studio predecessor. El Fantasma has also released two albums of (mostly) corrido covers: Recorded with Banda los Populares del Llando, Pa' los Recuerdos (For the Memories) Vol. 1 and 2 contain riotous and full-throated versions of tracks such as "Catarino y los Rurales", by Sinaloa narcocorrido Valentín Elizalde and Vincente Fernández's nostalgic "Mi Ranchita". El Fantasma expanded his regional outreach in 2019 with 10 Kilates (10 Karats), an accordion-suffused collection in the norteño style. And in 2020, Puerto Abierta (Open Door) consolidated his extraordinary four-year burst of creativity with a multi-generational album of duets featuring stars like Larry Hernández, Meño Sanchez and Julián Mercado.