How Cain Culto Forged a Path in the Fire
Get to know the rapping, fiddling Latine Loki with a smudge of black kohl around his eyes.
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.”
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