VMP Rising: Cash Bently

Back in 2023 when Cash Bently dropped his brilliant full-length debut, Cash Corridos 3, he reflected on the journey it took to get there in an interview with Apple’s Travis Mills. “It hasn’t even hit me yet. I’m just taking it day by day,” Cash said, overwhelmed that this body of work which links his family history with the popularity of regional Mexican music and pluggnb SoundCloud hits existed at all. Mills followed by asking when he might be able to properly reflect on the album. Bently added: “I don’t know, bro. Probably years from now.”

Two years later, with Cash Corridos 3 firmly planted as a classic within the sprawling, shapeshifting world of regional Mexican music subgenres, does Bently feel any different? VMP caught up with the songwriter in a Pasadena mall parking lot, where Cash was getting ready for a ski trip in Northern California and needed some updated gear. (The singer’s home survived the heartbreaking fires but his family’s ranch, tragically, did not.)

“Now, looking back, I see how much I’ve learned with the music and how to move throughout this industry. I guess it hits different now,” he explains. While Bently can still appreciate Corridos for the innovative effort it is, in addition to all the lanes it helped clear for him, he’s a more critical listener two years later. “Now when I listen, the big question is, ‘What could I have done better?’” Still, Bently marvels at how much he was able to accomplish with limited resources. “Everything was coming together slowly back then. I didn’t have a solid foundation. Everything is better now. It just feels better,” he adds.

Though Bently may not have felt the support from the music industry he now has, his career is the culmination of years of practice, both on stage and in the studio. As a young boy, Bently was constantly touring as part of his family’s cumbia band, getting his first taste of life on the road as a seven-year-old. Once his parents split up, Bently returned to a normal life in Virginia (in terms of his relationship to home life), bored out of his mind like every other teenager at school. He found a community of fellow music obsessives on sites like SoundCloud, and began using his talent as an instrumentalist to create beats for a wide swath of musicians. He became tight with artists like Summrs and Autumn!, making instrumentals for them that landed in the realm of the pluggnb style they had helped popularize across the web.

Cash’s decision to begin blending this rich alt-rap landscape with his Latin roots came courtesy of an alcohol-infused accident. “I was sitting in my apartment one night and I got fully blacked out,” he explains with just a smidge of regret in his voice. “I woke up the next morning and my roommate asked me to play what I made the night before. I was like, ‘What the heck? What did I do?’ I had this whole Mexican song! It sounded so good that I recorded a few more and put out the first Cash Corridos project.”

That first project arrived in 2020, and though it’s rougher and more raw than Cash Corridos 3, it clearly outlines the template he brought forth with his full-length breakthrough. 

By the time he began writing Cash Corridos 3, Bently had a few ideas he wanted to pursue on the full-length in a way he couldn’t on previous releases. With the support of label True Panther, he built the album piece by piece — recording instruments in a way that resembled his musical life before the internet.

“Everything was made from scratch and everything was done in-house. As a producer making YouTube-type beats, there’s not always a story behind the song,” he explains. On Corridos 3, he wanted to make sure every lyric, every verse, every song had meaning, something listeners could latch onto. “Every song has its story and there’s real emotion behind it,” he adds.

Opener “Loco Sin Ti” is mournful but nevertheless extremely catchy, with Cash’s voice bouncing along with the low-end bump of the bass. He sings in Spanish of drowning in booze, yearning for a woman who is not around and is maybe not returning. “Enamorado” is another love-hungry jam, but horn accents deployed on the offbeat to give the song a celebratory energy. 

Outside of his familial influences, his love of Chief Keef, and his preternatural production abilities, Bently points to pioneering regional Mexican music and corridos star Ariel Camacho as his north star. Camacho died tragically in 2015 at the age of 22, and much of Cash Corridos 3 is made with the flame that Camacho helped spark. “He was the first one to change up regional Mexican music, and it allowed other artists to do the same. He walked so we could run. I’m always paying homage to him,” Bently explains.

As he figures out what he’ll be doing next, Cash also has a new inspiration in his life. He’s welcomed a little girl in the world and it’s changed his entire approach to music — to the entire world, really. “It changes everything. Even what I say in songs, you know what I mean? She’s going to grow and she’s going to hear the songs,” he says. “I’m just very careful with everything, I almost overthink everything I do now, but in a good way. This perspective has shifted how I make music, too.”

Cash Corridos 3, despite these different strands of shared DNA, is the sort of project that can only emerge from one person at one moment in time. “If someone were to hear it now, it still sounds new. I feel like I could release it again today,” he says. “I’m still working on a sound that isn’t too common right now.” It’s one of a kind, but it’s still an homage to the world he was raised in. “I want people to see the diversity and the love that I have for the genre and the type of music that I make,” he adds. Cash Bently is fueled by love, by memories, by a desire to push his history into the future.