Cain Culto Is Not Interested in Making Things Easy to Categorize on His Debut Album, CULTO

There’s a lot to unpack when interviewing an artist like Cain Culto. You have to talk about his upbringing as a worship pastor, an almost too perfect backdrop for the rebellion that followed. You have to talk about his roots, a cultural palette that stretches from Colombia and Nicaragua to Kentucky, and inevitably makes its way into the rich musical pastiche of his debut album, CULTO. Then there’s his musicianship, his ear for production, his penchant for eye-popping visuals and a flair for theatrical live performance.

But before you get to any of that, there’s really only one way to start the interview.

“So, should I call you Cain Culto or Andrew?”

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Born Andrew Padilla, the artist created Cain Culto as an alter ego through which he could explore parts of himself that had long been suppressed, particularly his queerness. The name draws from  the biblical Cain, an outcast of sorts. But rather than accept that story’s tragic conclusion, he saw Cain Culto as an opportunity to reclaim it.

That resistance to prescribed identities has since become something of a guiding principle. “I do resist being boxed in so much just as a personality trait,” Culto tells Consequence. “But I also create in that way. I want to explore all these things and it just flows naturally.” He’s also not particularly interested in making things easier to categorize. “I don’t think so much of things too strategically of, ‘Oh, it’d be better if I didn’t do that and people could digest and understand my work easier.’ That’s its own prison.”

Instead, Culto gravitates toward the collision itself. He cites artists like Pharrell Williams, Timbaland, Beyoncé, Madonna and, especially, Rosalía as reference points, but his own experiments pull from a particularly personal set of influences. “I am really fascinated by intersectionality and cross-cultural sounds,” he says. “I love when things are blended in ways that we haven’t seen enough of, or feel wrong, or like, ‘These two genres shouldn’t go together.’”

Born to Colombian and Nicaraguan parents, Culto spent his early childhood in South Florida before moving to Kentucky at age five. There, he absorbed bluegrass and Appalachian music while Latin pop remained a fixture through his parents and, particularly, his abuelita, whom he references throughout his songs. Revisiting artists like Marc Anthony and Carlos Vives, once played nonstop at home, has also allowed him to hear the “pop perfection” in music he largely took for granted as a kid.

“We were the only Latino family,” he remembers of his Kentucky neighborhood. “There was an othering experience in my young adult life and probably a lot of shame in being Latino.”

CULTO allows those parts of his upbringing to finally occupy the same space. “I felt like I hadn’t seen the Latino perspective, the merging of Southern Appalachia with these rhythms of Latin America,” he says. “And so that’s what I wanted to do on this record.”

The result moves through pop, rap, electronic music, Colombian folk traditions, bluegrass and gospel without settling comfortably into any of them. That was by design. “Since it’s my debut, the proper first body of work that I’m attaching my name to, I wanted it to give me the freedom later in my career for people to not box me in so easily,” he explains.

That approach predates CULTO. His breakout “KFC Santería” already mashed together Kentucky imagery, fiddle, club production, politics, queerness, and religious symbolism, eventually earning a remix with fellow violinist and genre omnivore Sudan Archives.

On CULTO, “Chiquilinda” turns feelings of separation from his family into Colombian musical references before, as Culto puts it, “somehow [getting] into the club as well.” It’s also perhaps the clearest realization of the intersectionality Culto is chasing: the album standout opens with a distinctly bluegrass fiddle before Colombian percussion and Latin chants gradually pull it somewhere else entirely.

“A Plague, A Pestilence” travels even further, moving through banjo and bullerengue before ending up “catching the spirit at a small Kentucky church,” as he puts it.

Elsewhere, that constant collision gives way to something much more bare. The penultimate “Hymn” strips away much of the album’s artifice and puts Culto’s voice front and center in an almost church-like melody that wouldn’t feel entirely out of place in a Coen brothers film.

One thing Cain Culto is still figuring out is what happens when these songs hit the stage. It’s also where the persona he’s created becomes most visually imposing, with towering hair, black kohl smeared around his eyes, an accentuated unibrow and, depending on the occasion, everything from cowboy boots to dramatically elongated, curved Mexican boots.

He only began performing regularly once much of CULTO was complete, and despite the theatricality of his shows, he admits creating in the studio or on his laptop still comes more naturally. “If I had to ditch one, I probably would never perform again,” he says. “The creative practice is just so precious to me.”

Yet the more he performs, the more familiar the experience becomes for reasons that predate Cain Culto entirely. Before leaving Christianity, Padilla spent years leading worship, sometimes three or four times a week. That taught him how to “feel a room and guide a room into some transcendent experience.”

The congregation may have changed, but some of the muscle memory remains. “There is a ritual aspect,” he admits. “There’s this invitation, in the similar sense of a worship service, into something that’s happening within the self that I’m allowing people to witness that isn’t purely just for entertainment.”

It’s tempting to wonder whether Padilla could lead this new form of gathering without the alter ego he once needed to access that confidence, vulnerability and freedom. But the truth is, over time, the line between the two has begun to crumble.

“People ask, ‘Should I call you Cain? Should I call you Andrew?’ Both feel equally as personal to me right now,” he says. “It feels blurrier than ever before.”

Perhaps that’s inevitable for an artist so suspicious of anything becoming too fixed. Culto says the deeper he gets into his practice, the more he understands identity itself as fluid, including the identity he created to set himself free in the first place.

“There is something about Cain, he’s this persona that I can destroy at any moment,” he says. “And there is still something beyond that within me.”