walking upstream…
Sech
Carlos Isaías Morales Williams grew up in the Río Abajo township of Panama City, the son of two pastors, and found his tenor voice in his church choir before street-vending his way into Panama's underground urbano scene. His 2019 breakout "Otro Trago" fused reggaetón with the plush balladry of Latin R&B — Rolling Stone called it a "piano-reggaeton ballad" — and by his second album he was explicitly reconnecting with the reggae en español lineage that raised him. Sech has said he wants to carry that legacy forward the way El General once did, an urbano hitmaker who keeps circling back to the genre's Caribbean, Spanish-language roots.
the sound in question
2019
Otro TragoSech
walk the tributaries ↓
El General1990s · Reggae en Español / Dancehall
El General was the reggae en español pioneer who first showed Panama that a Spanish-language artist could go global, and Sech names him directly as the model he's chasing: "I started listening to El General, Nando Boom, all these artists who had been coming up, and I fell in love with their music." The chanted, half-sung dancehall cadence and the uptempo, riddim-first songwriting on Sech's biggest solo club records trace back to that late-80s Panamanian scene.
listen: upstream & heresource: Rolling Stone — "From Panama With Love ↗
1990
Tu Pum PumEl General
2020
RelaciónSech
listen forListen for the loose, talked-as-much-as-sung delivery riding right on top of the beat rather than settling into pure melody, and for the way the track builds around a repeating rhythmic hook instead of a chord progression — that's the toasting-over-riddim logic El General brought into Spanish.
Nando Boom1990s · Reggae en Español / Dancehall
In the same breath Sech credits El General, he names Nando Boom as the other Panamanian artist whose records he "fell in love with" as a kid. Years into his own career Sech pulled Nando Boom onto his 1 of 1 album as a featured guest, and later titled a single "Dembow" — an explicit nod to the riddim Nando Boom's cover made famous worldwide.
listen: upstream & heresource: Rolling Stone — "From Panama With Love ↗
1990
Ellos Benia (Dem Bow)Nando Boom
2022
DembowSech
listen forListen for the durable two-drop drum pattern underneath the melody — the same skeletal "dembow" riddim Nando Boom's Spanish-language cover of "Dem Bow" popularized — resurfacing almost unchanged as the rhythmic bed under Sech's uptempo tracks decades later.
Boyz II Men1990s · R&B / Soul / Pop
Sech was a church-choir kid who, per Rolling Stone, spent his youth "covertly writing love poems" and jamming at home to "the classic slow jams of Boyz II Men" with his older brothers. That vocal-group R&B schooling surfaces in his most ballad-forward records — stacked harmonies and drawn-out melisma laid over slow-building piano rather than a straight reggaetón beat.
listen: upstream & heresource: Rolling Stone — "Meet Sech ↗
1992
End of the RoadBoyz II Men
2021
911Sech
listen forListen for the way the vocal runs stretch and bend around single syllables, and for the arrangement dropping the beat out entirely under the hook — that's 90s R&B slow-jam architecture, not reggaetón's, surfacing underneath Sech's romantic ballads.