RB Exclusive Interview: KinAhau on Individuality as Currency & Vulnerability in Music

In the chaotic, neon-lit backstage of the Phoenix Raceway, the air is thick with the residual energy of an electrifying set. Sebastián Betanzos, the 22-year-old Cancún native known as KinAhau, is winding down from a B2B performance that saw him and Brunello “throwing stuff at the wall” just to see what would stick. He’s drunk, he’s tired, and he’s remarkably open about the fact that his entire career, the viral hits, the Solid Grooves association and the global touring, nearly didn’t happen at all.

Everyone familiar with KinAhau knows the “trash man” story: the kid who infiltrated a club to give Michael Bibi a USB. But when you talk to Sebastián, he doesn’t treat it like a clever marketing stunt, viewing it instead as a survival tactic. 

“I was in college,” he says, eyes narrowing as he recalls the stakes. “I had like one semester of break to make it happen, and in my head I was like, ‘I have one year worth of my mom’s allowances,’ which was like a thousand dollars to make everything happen.”

Because there was no “Plan B,” the pressure was absolute. If the USB was tossed in the bin, Sebastián was headed back to a life he felt fundamentally unsuited for.

“I’ve always hated work. Like work.. man I just hate work,” he laughs. This wasn’t just about wanting to be a DJ; it was also about the desperate need to take life into his own hands. 

“I think that there’s a million ways to get there,” he reflects. “But I think that ultimately, making music and producing shit is about putting a little bit of yourself in a really bare way into the world.” 

This philosophy of vulnerability, of putting himself out there regardless of the risk, found its expression in his workload. If the trash man story is about his entry into the scene, the Triple T project is about his obsession with staying there. In May 2024, he released 30 tracks in 30 days via his imprint, Pocket Change. For most producers, that’s years worth of work, but for KinAhau, it was an overdue purge of his hard drive. Beneath those 30 tracks lies a graveyard of nearly 400 rejected records. 

“I make a lot of tracks and then… most of them don’t ever come out,” he admits. “So many, so many like, eight out of ten.” 

He’s a constructivist at heart, building layers in FL Studio – the DAW he’s been loyal to since he was 15 – and discarding anything that doesn’t feel weird enough. He avoids the sterile, “perfect” quantization that characterizes modern tech house, opting instead for what he calls the “imperfection that makes it perfect,” a philosophy he borrowed from King Krule.

That same willingness to embrace imperfection and face rejection defined one of the most telling moments of our conversation: his reflection on his track “Subject Study.” Before it became one of KinAhau’s most recognizable tracks, it was a failure. He sent it to 200 people. Most ignored it, and those who didn’t called it terrible. It made me wonder what caused him to stop trying to appeal to others.

“I think that when I started, I was really trying to be like PAWSA, like Michael Bibi,” he says. But as he found his own footing, he realized that taste is a moving target. Bibi played ‘Subject Study’ for 18 months before it was eventually released, proving that the underground is often just an echo chamber waiting for a singular vision to break through. This vindication taught Sebastián that his individuality is his only real capital. “The human being is really… That’s your currency,” he says. “How individual are you? What makes you different? That’s your money.”

KinAhau has spent the last year aggressively carving out his own space. You can hear it in his transition from the jazzy, summer energy of “Turned Turk” to the deeper, more dazy arrangements of his recent “Los Angeles Freestyle” EP. This evolution is partly driven by his nomadic lifestyle; he has lived in Barcelona, Madrid, Rotterdam, Rochester, and Rome absorbing the textures of each city.

In Rome, the isolation was “really scary,” but it provided the friction necessary to produce “Under the Flowerpot,” a track that marks a definitive pivot toward creative vulnerability. Moving to the city after years in Spain, Sebastián found himself stripped of his usual support system, living in an environment where he was forced to confront his internal world without the buffer of a familiar culture and language. The track, which he says “came out of the closet” of his apartment, is a stripped-back reflection of that solitude, a record that’s less of a club tool and more of a personal exorcism.

Yet, for all this internal excavation, Sebastián remains acutely aware of the external pressures of his growing profile. For a guy who’s had a viral presence since he was 13 – when a video of him dancing at a club in Mexico went local-legend – he is surprisingly wary of the spotlight. He brings up ‘The Dirt,’ the Mötley Crüe movie, which he watched with his mother as a kid. “I saw the movie and it ends up sad,” he says quietly. “It ends up like these people became addicts. Fuck everything up.”

He isn’t interested in being a “rockstar” if it means losing the craft. “Part of being someone with longevity, the thing I care about the most is, it’s really hard. It’s really draining,” he admits. He’d rather be the guy who goes back to the studio the morning after a show, showers, and makes a “killer song” than the guy who stays at the afterparty until 7 a.m.

As the interview wraps up, Sebastián is already looking toward the rest of the year. He wants to “set the record straight” about who he is. He isn’t the “trash man” anymore, and he isn’t just a shadow moving within another artist’s design.

“I think KinAhau is… The early project of someone who is falling in love with this industry,” he says. His goals are simple: keep it weird, keep it individual, and keep providing art to the people who are actually listening. 

He leaves one parting thought for the kids who are currently where he was four years ago: “If I can get this far by doing what I’m passionate about, I really believe that anyone is possible.”

Connect with KinAhau: Instagram | Spotify | SoundCloud