Corridos Ketamina's Cktriz Turns Scars into Hybrid Corrido Gold

Corridos Ketamina released Cktriz, a seven-track album that filters corridos tumbados through thick bass, distorted guitars and influences stretching from Atlanta rap to King Krule. The Mexican American duo — Henny Fay and Nico Malva — answers the question directly on the opening track, "Modo Tarantino," when a phone rings and a voice asks: "¿Quién lo produjo? ¿Quién toca la guitarra? ¿Quién lo diseñó?" ("Who produced it? Who's playing the guitar? Who designed it?")

The implication, as the track frames it: everyone wants to know who is behind their genre-blurring sound. Across the record's seven tracks, the duo makes music that plays like a corrido heard through a blown-out laptop speaker, with guitar lines cutting through the haze.

What shaped this sound?

Fay and Malva started Corridos Ketamina in 2021 and spent years conceptualizing both the sound and the visuals before introducing them in 2024. A self-titled debut EP followed in 2025.

Their foundation is corridos tumbados, the style fusing corridos — the Mexican outlaw ballad tradition — with trap and reggaeton. Natanael Cano pioneered the subgenre in 2019; Peso Pluma later carried it up the charts and into mainstream pop, helping remove the stigma around Mexican music that many Mexican Americans feel growing up in the United States.

Corridos Ketamina's interpretation pushes the style somewhere new. The duo adds rawer vocals and pulls in Midwest emo, rock ballads and Atlanta rap. Their lyrics fold stories of romance and Mexican subculture into verses stitched with designer labels — on "Modo Tarantino," Fay lists Balenciaga sneakers he never takes off, drugs, tequila, shellfish and the state of Jalisco.

Even the album title is a stylization: a clipped spelling of "cicatriz," the Spanish word for "scar," befitting a record marked by heartbreak sung over bruised guitars.

What does the album actually deliver?

After the opener, in which Fay flaunts his own Tarantino style — full of dark humor and cinematic swagger — the record melts into the highlight, "Ambient Wife." The slower, unrepentantly raunchy ballad plays like a confession. Both members sing softly over a guitar loop that barely changes: "Adicto a tu olor/Mojadita, nado en tu jugo/Donde quieras, te lo doy" ("Addicted to your smell/Wet, I swim in your juices/I give it to you wherever you want").

The explicit material sits alongside subtler couplets: "En un bar, Nueva York/Una buchona, estilo Björk" — a bar in New York, a buchona with Björk's style. That line is the perfect Corridos Ketamina image: half narco glamour, half art-school crush.

The source review carries no rating — it is, notably, an un-scored first assessment. Whether the duo's hybrid outlasts the novelty of its blown-out aesthetic will depend on what Fay and Malva do after the scars have been catalogued.