(Elana Marie / For De Los; photos by Jill Connelly / For De Los)
On Friday night in Los Angeles, before fans trickled into the Peacock Theater for a music-filled evening, the award-winning Colombian singer-songwriter Manuel Turizo gathered his dancers and crew to pop a bottle of bubbly in the makeshift dining room onstage.
“A seguir rompiendo,” said Turizo, toasting to his team that night, just before their second-to-last performance in the U.S. this year. “Let’s keep killing it!”
It was the final stretch of Turizo’s “201” North American tour — a journey that kicked off earlier this summer in Jalisco, Mexico, and included stops in Chicago, Miami and New York. The singer will soon continue his world tour through Europe, which includes multiple stops in Spain, Portugal, France and Italy; he will then move on to South America next year, closing with a concert in his native Colombia, where he’ll play in Bogotá on Feb. 13, 2026.
“I just want to party like when I’m with my people, [just] hanging out with my friends,” says Turizo in an interview backstage with The Times. “That was the idea, to bring my home onstage.”
It’s been almost a year since the 25-year-old released his fourth studio album, “201,” a record that delves into his Caribbean roots and pays homage to his vibrant hometown of Montería, but more specifically, the childhood apartment where he cultivated his love of music.
Onstage at the Peacock Theater, his crew members constructed a stylized replica of that apartment: No. 201. One room contained a dining table adorned with plastic grapes, while the bedroom next door displayed a bedside picture with his pug Arya, as well as a rack of sports jerseys that Turizo has collected from previous stops in Mexico and Miami.
“When I was 12 years old, I already knew that I loved music,” said Turizo. His rich baritone first captured listeners in 2017 with his debut single, “Una Lady Como Tú,” a vallenato-turned-reggaeton track he composed with his older brother, Julián Turizo. (Julian also tours with Manuel as a backup vocalist.)
Recorded with the soft touch of ukulele, the yearning love ballad began topping charts across Latin America, when Turizo was just 16 years old. Not long after, he signed a management deal with La Industria Inc., a label led by Colombian-based music mogul Juan Diego Medina, as well as a record deal with Sony Music U.S. Latin.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. I’m 25 now, so maybe tomorrow I will want to do something else,” he says. “But right now I enjoy music a lot. I love this.”
In “201,” Turizo melds vallenato, an accordion-based style of Colombian folk music, with urban beats and tropical rhythms. Standout tracks on the album include “Qué Pecao,” a twinkling bachata number featuring his fellow countryman Kapo, and the high-strung “Dios Te Cuide,” a condemning breakup song that prays to a higher power for strength.
Then there’s “Sígueme Besando Así,” a gently sung ballad that crescendos into a romantic salsa. It was during this number that Turizo spun around his rotating microphone onstage, marking the halfway point of his dynamic live show.
The “201” tour gives Turizo the opportunity to share his chart-topping hits like never before — including “La Bachata,” which has amassed more than 2 billion streams on Spotify alone and earned him his first solo entry into the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at 67. He further picked up the pace with “El Merengue,” his merengue-pop collab with American DJ Marshmello.
While other artists might feel pressured to plant themselves in a specific genre, Turizo’s career has been mostly defined by his flexible approach to various sounds across the Latin landscape. Lately, the singer has also embraced the growing popularity of música Mexicana — notably alongside popular acts like Fuerza Regida, with whom he shared a breezy corrido tumbado, “Una Cerveza,” as well as with Grupo Frontera in its cumbia track, “De Lunes a Lunes.” Both hit songs evoked a roaring reaction among the over 5,000 attendees, as Turizo’s crew rolled out a red cooler with empty beer cans for a make-believe boozy ordeal.
“Mexico was the first country that started connecting with my music after I left Colombia,” says Turizo, which he also mentioned to his fans at the Peacock Theater. “The connection is very organic.”
In 2025 alone, he’s paired up with corrido singer Xavi for their swaying corrido-bachata hit “En Privado,” and later Becky G for the bachata-laden flirtation that is “Que Haces.” Earlier this summer, the Colombian singer also joined forces with Los Ángeles Azules in the electronic cumbia “El Despertador.”
“If I go to the studio, I just want to [let go of] all the ideas that I have in my mind,” he said of his clean-slate approach to music. “It doesn’t matter what genre.”
Turizo’s future projects are yet to be revealed — at least to the public. What audiences can expect, however, is a forthcoming fifth studio album, with “huge acts” that Turizo never imagined collaborating with growing up in apartment No. 201.
“I feel like this is [going to be] the dream album,” he said of his new project.
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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