The broadcast began at 1 pm on July 28th with a title that read like a challenge among friends: make a mixtape with LATIN MAFIA and stay here until we finish it. Over the next 50 hours of YouTube broadcast from Lago Algo, a cultural center in Mexico City’s Bosque de Chapultepec, British producer Fred… and Mexican trio LATIN MAFIA built 9 months and 50 hours.
They did it in public that most other musicians prefer to keep behind the closed doors of their studios; unattractive middle of the record.
Fred again… brings the same brilliance to his Indian fans with three shows in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.
The mixtape entered the Billboard Top Latin Pop Albums chart at No. 1, marking their only No. 1 debut on the chart and the group’s first debut since 2020, peaking at No. 8 on Top Latin Albums and No. 9 on Top Dance Albums.
This is Fred’s first appearance on the Latin charts.
For several hours while the mixtape was being prepared, you could see everyone in the room smiling, laughing and enjoying the arrangements they had created minutes ago, which is almost as intimate as a musical experience. Most albums we hear at home, alone, long after they’re polished and ready for release. Here we were invited to sit in a room while everything was still soft and controversial.
On July 30, the recording was completed. Just a few hours later, LATIN MAFIA and Fred again… took the stage at the Palacio de los Deportes and played it to a sold-out crowd of over 20,000 people. July 31, 9 months and 50 hours released on all streaming platforms, approximately 46 minutes long; The 14 tracks were released by Fred’s Atlantic Imprint in collaboration with Rimas Entertainment.
But there’s more to this story than a 50-hour live broadcast. LATIN MAFIA are three brothers from Mexico City, including Emilio, Milton and Mike de la Rosa, and Fred has been circling them since he declared himself a fan of their 2024 debut. They bounced ideas off and on for two years, hosted each other in London and played a show together in Mexico City last December. Everyone watched as a long private collaboration finally came to an end and went public.
Fred is a master of live performance and has spent years creating his work in public. He debuted on Twitch and released continuous footage of every performance from his USB002 tour, spanning over four days. This last undertaking can only be regarded as its fullest expression.
Behind the shine
The technical details were less improvised than the shot suggests. McIntosh, an American audio company that has been making high-quality amplifiers and speakers since the late 1940s, supplied a custom room listening system built around the XRT2.1K loudspeakers, tall tower speakers designed to reproduce sound with very little inherent coloration. Thus, the room was listening to the record at a level closer to a master class than a session on a laptop. Credit goes to Benji Gibson, Fred’s younger brother and musical partner, who fronts the band Bby, produced Teezo Touchdown and Baby Keem, and co-wrote and co-produced the mixtape.
Fred builds the euphoria slowly, allowing it to come from unexpected angles, while LATIN MAFIA sing in Spanish with a warmth and pain they don’t try to hide. These two sounds go together easily. The tape moves through British garage with its galloping, erratic drum patterns, moving into cumbia, the Colombian rhythm that has become a staple in Latin America, and then into stretches of ambient that are slow, textured and largely beatless, without ever losing its footing. Fred on Instagram described the strange ease of it: everything they created felt like one “closed universe,” without his usual effort to create it.
It is still unknown whether LATIN MAFIA will appear next to him. But the record he’s carrying into these fields was made in a room with paint cans in the corner, in front of everyone who wanted to watch, and there’s something worth noticing about an artist of his stature deciding that the most interesting thing he could show us was just work.
Fred again… will play his first shows in India in December: Delhi NCR on the 5th, Mumbai on the 9th and Bangalore on the 13th. The concerts were so well subscribed that additional nights had to be added in Mumbai and Bangalore, and even then, with tickets priced at ₹1,750 and ₹3,500, well below the usual price for an artist of his stature, all tickets released so far were sold out on BookMyShow.
Published – September 16, 2026 01:28 pm EST.
