Nsqk owes a lot to a broken-down computer his uncle gave him when he was in middle school. “He had given me his old laptop with, like, Windows Vista on it,” the 26-year-old artist remembers with a laugh. “It barely worked.”
Yet somehow, Nsqk — whose real name is Rodrigo Torres — managed to download the production software FL Studio and began learning how to make his own beats. Around the same time, Skrillex had just released his 2010 EP Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites, and Nsqk remembers how that project gripped all of his friends at school in Monterrey, Mexico, where he was born and spent a lot of his childhood. “Apart from the fact that it was cool and everyone else was listening to it, it was really interesting to me — like, how he was doing it,” he says. He decided he wanted to try to create the same sounds himself.
Nsqk logged hours and hours making EDM all through high school. He moved to Houston with his family at one point, and kept pursuing music, trying to get traction on SoundCloud. “A lot of that time it was a little frustrating because I did want to be a DJ and play live,” he says. “I’d send my tracks to SoundCloud labels and I don’t think I ever once heard back. But now, I really do remember it with a lot of love because I think it’s the good old days. I really didn’t have to worry about much.”
His family didn’t understand what he was doing in front of the computer all day, and things only got more complicated as his interest in an artistic career deepened. Once he entered college, where he studied marketing, he started singing and branching out toward pop, reggaeton, and rock sounds. Some of his beats began to get picked up by local artists, which made Nsqk start thinking more seriously about a career as a performer. “I would see them onstage and I would feel super jealous. Like, I realized that I wanted to be on stage as well,” he says. However, that path wasn’t the easiest. “I started playing live and my parents did not like it because if you’re paying a private college for your son and he has a scholarship and then suddenly he wants to play music at, like, the worst bars, I understand why they were worried.”
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Still, Nsqk wasn’t deterred. He slowly found a community of artists in Monterrey, and they all supported one another’s music. A friend of his had compiled a text thread of people organizing events and making art in the city — they found strength in their own numbers. “We had a problem where we’re local rappers and nobody wants to go to our shows, so we’ll just go to our shows, you know? So we would practically take turns like this weekend, like, ‘This guy will play and we’ll all just attend.’” Eventually, Nsqk began building a local fanbase.
Then, in 2020, he started to think about releasing a full album of music. “I love albums, and I love albums that tell a story,” he says. So he put together his debut, 2022’s Roy, a darker turn that channeled inspirations like Porter Robinson: “I wanted to make an album where every song didn’t sound like any specific music genre.”
According to Nsqk, Roy reflected a bleak period in his life. “I was probably severely depressed at the time,” he says, looking back. “I was having a super hard time. I really didn’t like where my life was. I was still studying and I didn’t want to be, my relationship was super bad with my parents, and at the same time, the pandemic had just started.” Some of those feelings made it into songs, like the surging, rock-inspired “Sur,” or the melancholy sway of “Dientes,” which each grapples with heartbreak and loss. The album piqued the interest of kids looking for indie-driven rock and pop, and slowly, Nsqk gained momentum.
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He followed up Roy last year with ATP, a vibrant meditation on a breakup bursting with all kinds of vibes, colors, and sounds. In addition to pairing Nsqk with like-minded acts in Latin music (there are collabs with Alvaro Diaz, Paopao, and El Malilla), ATP broke him into bigger audiences. Bonus tracks released later, like “BAD INTENCIONES” and “LOVELANGUAGE,” garnered more than one million views each on YouTube.
The music also paved the way for Nsqk’s 2025 tour through Latin America and the U.S., which will include stops at major festivals like Ceremonia in Mexico City. And he’s already dipping in and out of the studio, thinking about new music and where another project might take him after ATP. “It’s helped open our eyes to all the possibilities,” he says. “Before, it felt like I was more of a niche project. Now, we realized that’s not really the case.”
