It’s a rainy early morning on a random Tuesday in Madrid, and Ralphie Choo has already been up for hours. “Would you like some coffee?” he immediately asks as soon as I step foot inside his house, proudly showing off his new Barista Express coffee machine as soon as the offer is accepted. “I’ve been really into coffee lately,” he says, weighing the exact 18 grams of beans needed for a double shot of espresso.
Seeing how at ease he is with the mundane morning ritual, it’s easy to forget this is the same person who was playing in front of multiple thousands of people in the centric Plaza del Callao just a couple of weekends prior, where he FaceTimed Spanish popstar Rosalía live. Exactly two weeks before then, the duo had released the ballad “Omega,” their first collaboration, which arrived in honor of Rosalía’s 32nd birthday and had been brewing for a long time.
“The day Rosalía followed me on Instagram, I almost had a heart attack,” Choo confesses with a smile, sitting comfortably in a sinking bean bag chair overlooking a street flanked by yellowing trees as the rain intensifies. “I think I was on my way to print some fanzines I had made at home that we prepped for the album’s release party. I was holding the cardboard box, and I suddenly saw the notification. I was with my friend Barry. He drove me because I did not have time for the subway that day. I saw the bubble, and I was stunned.”
In 2023, Rosalía gave Choo a couple of shoutouts on her accounts, sharing a few slides in honor of his debut album Supernova, which she handpicked as her personal AOTY. By the time 2024 rolled around, the duo were already hanging out in real life, giving fans hope of a collab posting a picture of the two ice skating in Madrid. Choo says they had been DMing for a while by then. He had sent her a few demos, one of them being the early version of what would eventually become “Omega.” Before he could even fully process it all, he was on a plane to L.A. to work with her team.
“From then to making it a tangible thing was kind of hard,” Choo confesses. “It was a lot of back and forth. We were working remotely, sometimes even on vacation. I remember being in Portugal and then on the road in Mexico for some shows and having to go record some vocals. Then we got the right balance and had a clear picture of what we wanted, and all that was left was shooting the music video. I think we’ve forged a really beautiful friendship. I want to treasure it and make it last. I think she’s just so admirable and charming. She really tries to take care of everybody around her.” Of course, the web of Choo’s collaborators expands way beyond the “Saoko” singer, but his music story began solo.
Born on December 18, 1998, in Madrid, Choo — whose real name is Juan Casado Fisac — never really considered music an option. That is, until it was. When his parents got divorced, Choo and his twin sister relocated to their mom’s native Ciudad Real, a city about an hour's train ride away from Madrid. At 16, he moved back to the Spanish capital to finish high school because he needed “a change of air,” as he puts it. “I wanted to meet new people and break from the same routines, and my friend Ricky was already in Madrid,” he says. “I got to know people slowly but surely. I also joined a soccer team, which helped.”
After high school was over, he needed to pick a major, and that’s when his mom semi-forced him to pursue a music degree. “Music conservatories always felt a bit classist to me and a little too methodical,” Choo explains. “But my mom made the decision, so I was like, ‘Ok if I have to pick something, I guess I’ll pick the French horn.’ I still remember the fingering and the techniques, and I played a couple of trumpets for the album, but I don’t really play it anymore.”
The French horn might not have been love at first sight, but the more he studied music, the more he fell into the allure of creating his own world. “It wasn’t until I started composing my own stuff that my family truly were like, ‘I guess you like this.’ I don’t like saying it was ‘my thing’ because I truly don’t think we are meant to stick to one thing for life, but it was like, ‘Ok, you can make music.’”
Then, in the middle of it all, he tore his ACL playing soccer and was bedridden for a while. “That was the determining factor that made me want to take music more seriously,” he says. “I was like, ‘Ok, I can’t move my body, so I need to start playing with my mind because there’s just not much I can do. I started conjuring up concepts and creating my little imaginary from there.”
During his studies, Choo learned everything from orchestral direction to analytical composition and modern harmonies. The process of putting little pieces together to create something out of thin air was the most exciting aspect of music for Choo. Some keys. A trumpet. A guitar strum. A nature sample. Vocal layering. Even tapping into everything, Choo still struggles to call himself a “multi-instrumentalist,” as many dub him these days. “I don’t really think I’ve mastered any instrument,” he says. “Not even the piano, which is supposed to be my main. Not at all. But there are tricks nowadays, and I can make anything sound like I envision it with DAW [Digital Audio Workstation] by recording stuff in snippets. What some people might record in one track, I just do it in seven.”
The first song he put together, as part of his degree, was inspired by this penchant for sampling and was called “Vichyssoise.” “It was a love story about two people who met at the club and looked into each other’s eyes,” he explains as a smile forms at the corners of his mouth — partly cringing and partly amused by the nostalgia.
Somewhere along the road. Juan Casado Fisac became Ralphie Choo, adopting the moniker inspired by The Simpsons character Ralph Wiggum and his "I Choo Choo Choose You” Valentine’s card. “My real name was a little too Castillian and a little too simple,” Choo explains. “I needed something that was easy but also memorable to kind of expand my universe beyond just Juan Casado. I actually had a whole list.”
A little further down the road, Choo also found his “tribe” and joined Madrid music collective Rusia IDK, which is now composed of Choo himself as well as Rusowsky, Tristán, Drummie, and Mori. Formed in 2019, Rusia IDK owes its genesis to their shared manager, Manuel Jubera, who was also the person who convinced Choo to release his music entirely in Spanish. When he was still crafting his artistic identity, he toyed with the idea of singing in English, partly for ease and partly to appeal to the masses. But something was not clicking.
“My first few demos were in English because the majority of the music I listen to is in English,” Choo says. “It felt weird singing in Spanish. Phonetically, I thought it was way more difficult with all the consonants and stuff.""
"The problem was that I sounded a lot like my references and the music I listened to," Choo continues. "My manager really hammered the Spanish into me. And then I also saw Rusowsky and my friends making cool music in Spanish, so I took it as a way to make a statement and reclaim Spanish art and really make it my own. Why would I want to make music that sounds like Tyler, The Creator when Tyler, The Creator exists? [Once I internalized that], my identity felt much more authentic.”
Still, Choo believes his identity will be forever evolving. “Knowing yourself 100%? I don’t know. I feel like one would have to be a monk for that,” he says. “But I know what I like and what I don’t a lot more than I did before.” Among the things he likes are visual references aplenty — from Paul Thomas Anderson and Brian De Palma to Alejandro Jodorowsky. “The more references you have, the better you know yourself,” he says.
Choo’s infatuation with cinema is palpable in the visuals for Supernova, his debut album, which arrived via Warner Records in 2023. In the music video for “WHIPCREAM,” his collaboration with Los Angeles hip hop duo Paris Texas, he tapped Roy Viceroy to direct, conjuring up an eclectic vision that is as bizarre as it is captivating. The same can be said of “Máquina Culona,” also helmed by Viceroy, this time in tandem with David Heofs of Madrid-based creative production company Bandiz.
“Máquina Culona,” a collaboration with British producer Mura Masa, whom Choo calls a creative genius, was actually one of the first tastes of Supernova before the album was released in full and one of Choo’s first releases since signing with Warner, which was not an easy road. “I was trying to get signed when we had the first draft of the album, and people started to show interest,” he recalls. “It was mainly people in the U.S. interested, not so much in Spain, because Pitchfork had named ‘Bulerías de un Caballo Malo’ as a Best New Track. It was a little nerve-wracking. Like I was signing with blood. But I think we got a pretty fair deal. It was a long process. A lot of back and forth, but I’m thankful for our A&R, Jackson [Harris], who really loved the project and fully dedicated himself. He’s a true music lover and saw our project as something different that he could truly help shape and push.”
Supernova laid the foundation for what Choo wants to build, but there’s still a long way to go before reaching the top. Supernova was over three years in the making. He is now carefully planning the next steps — and there are three things he knows for sure. The first one is that it won’t be for everyone.
“Trying to appeal to everybody can get a little bit tiring, can’t it? I do want to make popular music that expands far and wide and that everyone, from a 60-year-old lady to a 10-year-old child, can enjoy, but I don’t want to be liked by everyone," he says. "If I tried to make music for everyone, all my ideas would just go to the trash. Making stuff so people will like you is boring.”
Another thing he knows is that it will be bigger than Supernova. “I’ll be going to L.A. soon to produce stuff with some other people,” he teases. “I like playing with the element of surprise. Getting ahead. I think I did that with Supernova, and I plan to keep doing things in that vein. Testing things. Pushing the limits. Supernova set a standard, especially in terms of production, so I’d like to explore some other sounds and other processes. When you feel proud of something and feel like something has worked, you suddenly feel like you skipped two steps, so I do have that little voice inside my head telling me it has to be at least comparable.”
The third thing is that he won’t rush the process. “Making an album is organically the next step, so that’s what I’m doing, but I don’t have a deadline,” he says, swirling his coffee cup signaling it's coming to an end. “I’m in workaholic mode, hyper-focused on making a lot of demos, but I don’t want to give myself a timeline. I don’t want to say, ‘By this time, it has to be done,’ because I don’t want to feel stressed.”
“Doing what you like as a job is a double-edged sword,” he continues. “But it is a job. A lot of the time is spent finalizing stuff and signing stuff, so that’s why I really like to treasure the brainstorming stage. [At this stage], you also need to surround yourself with people whose opinion you value, and that will be 100% honest if they don’t like something.” For Choo, those people are his manager and his Rusia IDK family as well as his housemates. “They keep me grounded because otherwise, it’d be a constant inner monologue, and it’d be difficult to draw the line.”
Before he fully moves on to build the next chapter, Choo has an era to close with two shows in Barcelona’s iconic Razzmatazz venue this February. “And then is off until further notice, until I finish the new album and make a decent presentation,” he says. “The plan for the future is to have a base camp in Madrid and just [travel as needed.] If I want to spend two months in Lisbon, I can. If I want to do a residency in Stockholm to listen to a man who plays tuned crystal cups, I can. You know?”
“Taking a break is nice,” Choo, who, in the last year alone, has played venues everywhere from Spain to Belgium, Mexico, the U.S., Netherlands, and France, says. “Not being everywhere and playing the same things is nice. Of course, you are making new songs and performing them live for the first time, but the idea of disappearing off the face of the earth for a little and then sending a little signal like red dot, I’m here, is also really appealing right now.”
Longer lead, that signal might materialize in the form of something many won’t see coming. “I really want to write an opera,” Choo says, deadpan, when asked about his ambitions. “I want to make all types of art coexist, you know? From visual art and cinema to dance and fashion, with an orchestral guiding thread," he says, getting more animated at the prospect — then again, the coffee is long gone, so it might just be the caffeine kicking in.
“I think that’s where I’m headed,” Choo continues. "It will be tough, but I think the key is not just imagining things but making them happen. Carrying out ideas is crucial. I think it’s way more valuable to invest the time to get up and make the things you dream about real. So, yes, I’ve got many things inside my head that I want to turn into real things. It’s tough as sh*t, but I’ll push as hard as I can. I mean, I am pushing.”
Raplhie Choo spoke in Spanish for this interview. His quotes have been translated and adapted into English by the writer.
