David Bisbal

This Spanish singer is a bona fide superstar who has brought some of flamenco’s duende to his work while crafting chart-topping pop ballads. David Bisbal Ferre was born in 1979 in Almería, Spain. His father was both a boxer and part of a flamenco trio, and Bisbal grew up around that music, which would later influence his creative work. A shy kid, he dropped out of school at 15 and found a job singing with a local orchestra. That experience helped uncover his musical talent, but his career was supercharged when he auditioned for the first season of a pop-idol TV show called Operación Triunfo in 2001. Though he didn’t win (he came in second), the experience launched him: he signed with Vale Music and released his debut LP, Corazón Latino, in 2002. The album was an instant sensation thanks to its first single, the soaring dance-pop nugget “Ave María”. But what especially attracted fans was his voice’s undeniable emotion, which was only heightened on subsequent releases like 2004’s Bulería, where Bisbal dialled up the flamenco influences without sacrificing his heart-churning balladry. (It didn’t hurt to have award-winning producer and songwriter Kike Santander at his side.) Bisbal remained an audience favourite throughout the 2010s, and later in that decade he began to experiment, collaborating outside his comfort zones with mariachi, banda and even urbano artists like Sebastián Yatra (“A Partir De Hoy”). His 2020 release En Tus Planes continued in that eclectic, heartfelt vein, proving that Bisbal could stay true to himself while establishing relevance for a new generation.