How Cain Culto Forged a Path in the Fire

Going Up is a profile series featuring artists we love who are on the verge of breaking through.

Cain Culto is a paragon of artistic confidence: a vamping, twerking powerhouse with a sly, silver-grilled smile. He's a shredder on the violin whose lyrics, in English and Spanish, meld his political consciousness with his penchant for shaking ass. On his 2025 breakout hit with fellow rapper-violinist Sudan Archives, “KFC Santería (Remix),” Culto rapped about “American dollars fundin’ genocide” alongside “daddies in my DMs tryna pay for that,” and it did not sound incongruous at all. On his most recent single, “Cucuru,” he cranks up his suave voice to the pitch of a kewpie doll to sing lyrics like, “Let me be brash and abrasive/Speaking my truth with a brave tongue,” over a dollop of Afro-Colombian bullerengue, a philosophical statement from a fearless shapeshifter. He's a musical omnivore who stands on business in every song, conjuring spells against malignant forces with the self-assuredness of an artist who knows exactly who he is.

But for Andrew Estevan Padilla, it’s been a long path to develop his superheroic musical alter ego. Growing up in Kentucky and South Florida, he served as a youth pastor in an evangelical church, where he repressed his true self and devoted his music to God. Then his mind and body rebelled, and he embarked on a journey of embracing his queerness through his music. 

“In my earlier songs, I’m still very fragile and afraid and working through many things,” Padilla says on a video call from his home in Los Angeles. “And then you hear me build confidence, willing to stand alone and present more authentically. Maybe the mischievous aspect of me birthed from there, too—like, Well, I’m so misunderstood, let me just troll a little bit. All these things everyone’s telling me I’m not supposed to become feel so liberating and true.”

He was always a little rebellious, though, starting from his insistence in playing bluegrass instead of classical when he first took up the violin in fourth grade. The son of immigrants from Colombia (dad) and Nicaragua (mom), he spent his first several years in South Florida before moving to Lexington, Kentucky, with his family. “When I was young, my dad always had this dream of assimilation—his fantasy of this American dream,” Padilla says. “And there was something quaint and beautiful about moving to a small town in Kentucky.” The Padillas were among the first Latine families in a predominantly white neighborhood, and he remembers when “probably some idiot kid” once spraypainted “KKK” on their garage door. But he also learned about Southern politeness, and his parents placed him in a magnet art school and found him a fiddle instructor who taught him bluegrass technique.  

As an adolescent, Padilla and a friend began posting covers of hits by Karmin and Fun on YouTube. Looking back, he sees those early videos as planting the seeds of his maximalist production style, where he translated his love of big pop songs via GarageBand and Logic. He began writing his own music then, too—worship songs for his church, but also those for himself. He recalls one of the first songs he ever wrote, “When Pigs Fly,” in which he started to express his own teen rebellion. “It was about, like, ‘I’ll care about what you say when pigs fly,’” he says, chuckling. “So bad, but in my mind, I thought I was so cunty with that.” 

Padilla wasn’t sure he could be a professional musician, though. So one weekend at a men’s retreat he attended with his father, he decided to put it to God, praying that if anyone read a certain Bible verse to him during the trip, he would know to follow his musical dreams. At the retreat, he played a song he had written and all the men sobbed. “It was the first time I experienced my work affecting people in such an intense way,” he remembers. But by the last day, no one had said the fated Bible verse—until the preacher stopped mid-sermon and read it. “Obviously, I've gone through my own deconstruction [with the church],” Padilla says, “but for a long time in my early young-adult life, that experience of having something so concrete to hold onto in my emotional self gave me that delusional belief that this is my path.”

Padilla’s self-belief as Cain Culto, mischievous gay superhero, is kinetic. On “Bimbaubau,” a summery party track, he analogizes the pop divas he loves to what sounds like extremely fine booty. Set to the melody of Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine’s 1985 single “Conga”—a South Florida classic that still resonates with Latines across the diaspora—and embellished with staccato violin stabs, he delivers his missive with the sensual self-possession of his many singles and last year’s Occulto 001 EP. “Tu culo me habla catalán com Rosalía/Nalgas como Kali Uchis hablan por telepatía,” he raps, talking about a remarkable ass that both speaks Catalan and is telepathic. And his ability to weave through genres—Colombian vallanato and bluegrass, cacophonous and sproingy rap, Brazilian samba and funk, big and bright pop, and more—has enabled him to sound natural alongside collaborators across the spectrum, including the rappers Xiuhtezcatl and Snow tha Product, singer Jarina de Marco, and fellow provocateurs like Peaches and Brooke Candy.

While Padilla’s talent was never in question, his cuntiness and Godliness were destined to converge and, eventually, explode. In 2021, he was working as a worship leader for various churches in South Florida and touring with a rising Christian band called Ecclesia. He was also closeted and, he says, “actively kind of preaching against being queer. I hold a lot of regret and shame—I was a young kid, I didn’t have it figured out. But at the same time, I was placed in certain positions of influence, and I impacted people with that messaging.”

The cognitive dissonance became too much, and it led to what he calls a “mental break” that was exacerbated by fasting, praying, and touring with his band. He eventually had to be hospitalized due to a “split from reality.”

“I came out in those moments, essentially, because I was in a mental state where I couldn't repress anything,” Padilla says. “All my church leaders and family thought I was possessed. I mean, it looked like it. There were these feral parts of my shadow that were just out.” With medication, he says, he was able to have a fuller perspective on what was transpiring in his life. “I just had this moment of reflection of being like, Whatever led me to this really rock-bottom place, something is not right in my life. I needed to practically confront that and be willing to change to find something that’s more sustainable and healthy.”

Padilla will release the Occulto 002 EP in July, and after that, a full-length record. He’s excited to further expand his vast musical range, showing off epic orchestral work that zooms past algorithmic limitations. And he sees his forthcoming music as a manifestation of everything he’s been through, as he further embodies the ferocious pop persona that is Cain Culto. 

“The split aspect of myself is just becoming more unified. Looking back at that traumatic moment where my mind literally did split, there was this severing, and everything had to be in two different boxes: My sexual self is here, my spiritual self is here. But it’s like, Actually, no, let’s just integrate everything,” he says. “Instead of finding myself, it feels like I’m telling people who I am.”