Everything is going to plan until the unthinkable happens: Nebreda loses an acrylic nail mid-set.
"My nails!" she shouts.
She quickly brushes the catastrophic malfunction off and returns to hyping up the crowd. She frequently interjects with remarks like "Yes, bitch, yes!" "¡Que rico!" and "Put your money where your mouth is and pay your female producers!" that add to the exuberant mood she's building during her performance and bring in the idea that her sets are not just bubbly pop shows.
Nebreda's backup dancers match each other's moves, and the stage catches foot traffic with Nebreda's reggaetón/electronica panoply. Nick León, her collaborator on the track "Calor," and Luca Medici, one half of the duo INVT who produced the song "Arepa," are in the crowd taking in the spectacle. "She's my favorite person in Miami right now," León tells New Times after her set.
"I consider myself a white privileged person," Nebreda tells New Times over Zoom a month after her October performance at III Points. The 26-year-old is sporting black and bubblegum pink hair paired with thick eyebrows. Miniscule gemstones adorn her front teeth, and she's comfortably dressed in an oversized Champion hoodie. "I'm in these spaces that are very much like Afro-Black, dominant Black-created genres in places where sometimes also in the music industry, especially for Black Latin women, they don't get treated well. They don't get as much representation. Obviously, things are changing. But regardless of that, I think that music has a way of uniting."
Born in Venezuela to a Venezuelan father and a Peruvian mother, María-José Nebreda lived a nomadic existence during much of her childhood due to her father's work. "There was always a part of me that was interested in music, aside from the fact that it's in my culture," she says. "I come from so many different places that allowed me to understand music further. It broadened and gave me a sense of home with many different genres."
"Miami was the natural place to be," she continues. "I feel like I'm from here because I make sense here, and people are like me here — but also not entirely true being a nonbinary person."
A self-described party girl as a teenager, Nebreda referred to herself as the "same bitch" that she is today: a strong personality with a "move fast and break things" streak for social reform. "I had a great time as a teen," she recalls. "I saw so many bands like Sbtrkt and Azelia Banks and others that I still love to this day."
Still, it wasn't until Nebreda was 20 that she bought her first instrument: an electronic drum kit. Her first music project and first musical defeat was attempting to form a band called Las Plantanitas. "It took me a long time to find my own rooted way of producing music," she concedes.
In the meantime, Nebreda flirted with being a banker, earning a degree in mathematics. Nevertheless, Miami's Latin music scene beckoned her, and she touched Magic City soil five years ago at 21. Her first job in the city was working with artists and repertoire (more commonly known as A&R) for Warner Music Latino before moving to work directly with musicians. During this time, it became clear to Nebreda that she wanted to take part in the Latin music industry.
However, learning the machinations of the industry also exposed her to the cracks in the foundation. Rampant sexism and corruption in the Latin music industry led to a dearth of women in the scene. "It impacts women a lot — especially women of color," Nebreda notes.
Like many people in 2020, Nebreda took advantage of the lockdown to pivot from working behind the scenes to pursuing music, starting as a DJ at reggaetón raves and queer parties for Internet Friends. "Those were my favorite raves," she remarks.
In the meantime, she quietly plotted her turn as an artist who performed on stage singing and dancing. In 2021, she released her first single, "Adicto a Mi," a house track laced with Latin beats and sugary vocals.
Though the seeds of reggaeton germinated in Panama in the 1980s and were fine-tuned by Puerto Rican artists in the early '90s, reggaetón grew in popularity in the early aughts thanks to acts like Daddy Yankee. Back then, reggaetón, like mainstream hip-hop, was almost exclusively present in a straight, cisgender male point of view.
However, you have underground acts like Nebreda, who embraces femininity on her Arepa Mixtape and pushes up against the old guard. On the album's cover, Nebreda, wearing a bikini made of hemp twine, fruit, and arepas, lays on banana leaves with pink flowers in her red hair and mandarin orange slices on her forearms. She holds seeds in her left hand and an engorged yuca root in her right. A ripe avocado, seed intact, is placed on her pelvis.
Still, Nebreda notes that the record as a whole is less about a call for change; instead, she's asking you to go easy on yourself and realize that your body is a steamy sex machine if you want it to be.
The record has been warmly received by listeners and music sites like Pitchfork, where contributing editor Isabelia Herrera views Nebreda as shining a prototypical style to reggaetón's more antiquated themes.
"[Arepa] is this very online in its feel and look and very much putting the focus on women's pleasure," Herrera tells New Times. "Reggaetón is a genre that is 30 years old or more, depending on who you ask, and it consistently gets the bad wrap of being sexist and misogynistic, which is very true, but I do think it led me to point out in this review to point out that Arepa is speaking to MJ's own pleasure and confidence — and that's the trend going on in underground reggaetón and even the mainstream."
MJ Nebreda's Arepa Mixtape has been warmly received by listeners and music sites.
Photo by Tyler Jones
Her collaboration with León came after they met through a mutual friend. Their first project was the 2022 EP Amor en Los Tiempos de Odio. The two reuniting again for "Calor" on Arepa felt like a given. "She invited me to work on something for the Arepa Mixtape. I pulled up no questions," León tells New Times via email. "MJ has a vision and sticks to it, and I think people are inspired by that. She also goes out of her way to empower other Miami female producers, and I think that's very important."
In addition to León and INVT's contributions, Arepa Mixtape's ten tracks feature collaborations with Ana Macho, a trans and nonbinary artist from Puerto Rico; Dominican producer Móry; and neoperreo artist Ms. Nina.
"I would call neoperreo more an underground femme reggaeton scene," Nebreda explains. "It was natural — these were the girls. It wasn't femme only on the mixtape, and I don't know if I fit into one sound. There's an intensity in the rhythms that can manifest in all different ways. And I'm trying to learn all these sounds."
Regarding Miami's music scene, Nebreda says, "It's one huge community now, and that's almost what I'm also exploring in the album. It's like a lot of all the artists are independent, and all the artists like La Goony Chonga and Ms. Nina, they all kind of come from these movements that are outside the normal spectrum of what's accepted."
"I feel that Nebreda is part of this greater ecosystem, but she is really one of the more promising voices within it," Herrera adds. "One thing that I appreciate about MJ is her vocal style — how she gives this coy, breathy spin on the reggaeton voice. It very much echoes Glory and Jenny La Sexy Voz, who were responsible for making these hooks that made reggaeton successful in the mid-2000s and weren't credited. I think it's part of the same genealogy. We're channeling that area, but MJ is front and center."
"What the people want, they are going to get," Nebreda says. "Arepa Mixtape was just the warm-up."
