Photo by Rachel Bussey
Super Bowl LX was a big day for JULiA LEWiS. For the Los Angeles-based producer and songwriter, Bad Bunny’s historic halftime show signified a milestone year. LEWiS gathered with his wife, Rachel; the couple’s three-month-old daughter; and friends and family to watch.
The initial conservative backlash surrounding the now-iconic Super Bowl performance struck LEWiS as out of touch, to say the least.
“I think it put a light on our nation and how divided people are, and it showed how ignorant so many people are,” he says. “The fact that it’s a different culture that not everybody accepts, and a language that isn’t everyone’s first language, to me just highlighted how much xenophobia exists here.”
As the halftime show reached its climax over the opening melody of “DtMF”, Bad Bunny’s evocative take on Puerto Rico’s beloved plena music, LEWiS was filled with joy. It was a moment beyond what he could have imagined when he sent the loop that became the initial framework for the song to MAG, Bad Bunny’s longtime main producer. LEWiS was hoping to contribute to Bad Bunny’s then-untitled sixth solo LP, and his loop—one of many submitted—almost didn’t make the cut, as Bad Bunny and his team were satisfied the album was complete.
That project became 2025’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos, winner of the 2026 Grammy for Album of the Year. More than a year after its release, both the album and “DtMF” got a second life on the charts. “DtMF” reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 upon its release in 2025 and reentered the chart immediately after the halftime show, hitting No. 1 for the first time. In the week following the Super Bowl, 18 other Bad Bunny songs—many from Debí Tirár Más Fotos—made the Hot 100, and his entire catalog got a huge streaming boost. As of early April, “DtMF” remains in the Top 25 of the Hot 100.
Camp DtMF
While capable of solo projects, LEWiS knows when it’s worth it to team up. Back in 2024, he and fellow songwriters Tyler Spry and Scott Dittrich created an informal, ongoing songwriting camp in hopes of making it onto Bad Bunny’s next album.
“We realized, because we’re all producers, and we all can make cool creative decisions, let’s split up all the ideas that we’ve made,” LEWiS says. “Each one of us can be assigned to sort of finish the idea. So we’ll speed-run ideas. ‘You play this synth, I’ll play this bass, play this guitar, put them together. Okay, that sounds cool.’”
At the time, Bad Bunny’s main working team, helmed by MAG, kept the project close to the vest. LEWiS understood why.
“It’s trust-based working with artists closely,” he says. “You don’t want to talk too much, because then other people start talking to you, and he would say, ‘Hey, we’re working.’ The kind of feedback [MAG] would give us would be to tell us which of the ideas we were sending he liked and thought Benito might like. That was the extent of it.”
The way it worked is that LEWiS, Spry, and Dittrich would record five or 10 ideas and send them to MAG to get his thoughts.
“MAG would pretty much say, ‘Hey, I like these ones. Don’t send them anywhere else. Don’t play them for anybody. Give me all the stem files for the individual parts of these ideas in a folder,’” LEWiS says.
LEWiS’s contribution to “DtMF” is the opening synth riff that carries throughout the song. It highlights his signature style: vulnerability coupled with intense, impactful drums. Much of his music falls within the liminal space between “happy” and “sad”—the pathos that makes “DtMF” resonate so well.
When he heard the finished piece, it gave him goosebumps.
“Hearing for the first time how MAG made a new pocket with these drums, and then hearing how Benito sang on it … There’s more live instrumentation,” LEWiS says. “There’s a band playing on top, and it just kind of kept growing and had this magic in life that I couldn’t anticipate when we were playing synths and guitars in our studio. We didn’t imagine at all.”
LEWiS also wound up playing the Prophet V and Udo Super 6 synths on what became the first single from Debí Tirar Más Fotos, “EL CLúB.”
Debí Tirar Más Fotos was his second time working for Bad Bunny. Back in 2022, alongside MAG, he penned “La Jumpa”, a collaboration with Latin trap pioneer Arcángel.
LEWiS often works from his self-built home studio in Encino, California. A Latin Grammy casually hangs out next to his workstation, while his Australian shepherd dog, Azul, lolls out on the rug at his feet.
These days, he is as busy as ever. Grammy-nominated (and dictator-defying) Venezuelan group Rawayana’s new album dropped in January with four songs produced by LEWiS, and he’s plugging away on a song for the upcoming World Cup.
As often happens in this world, one thing leads to another, which is how LEWiS started working in K-pop. Mick Coogan, one of Bad Bunny’s collaborators, introduced him to music-industry veteran Joe Weinberger, who, in turn, connected him with the superstar group BTS’s label HYBE.
LEWiS helped flesh out “Talk to You,”, the lead single of TOMORROW X TOGETHER member YEONJUN’s first solo album, and he was tapped for a reggaeton remix of the global girl group KATSEYE’s hit “Gabriela.” But he’s not limiting himself to K-pop while bridging East and West. He’s started working with Japanese rapper 千葉雄喜 (Yuki Chiba) and Colombian artist Feid, Chiba’s close friend.
Born Benjamin Falik in Berkeley, California, LEWiS excelled at music from an early age. As a Charlie Parker-obsessed 13-year-old, he’d play East Oakland bars with his saxophone teacher’s jazz quartet.
“I learned how to listen,” LEWiS says of his time hanging out with musicians decades older. “I think that sort of formed my brain around producing music with the intention of it supporting a voice.”
In high school, he learned a little flamenco guitar while studying abroad in Spain, and at some point, he picked up keys. He moved to Los Angeles for college and majored in psychology, and inspired by a professor, he also completed a degree in critical race theory.
While still in college, he studied in Brazil, becoming immersed in the sounds of Bahia, especially the drum group Olodum, featured in the Spike Lee-directed music video for Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Care About Us.” Inspired, LEWiS began tinkering with beatmaking software.
Back home, he landed a job at an ad agency, where he remained for the next five years. By then, the Bay Area hyphy scene was at its peak, and again inspired, he began DJing and creating music alone every night after work. He credits this with helping him cope with stress and anxiety.
He chose the name JULiA LEWiS to upend expectations—an impulse that carried over from his ad agency days.
“I was looking at the names of predominantly male-driven beat makers, producers, and DJs,” he says. “So I thought of this image in my head of a shy girl from Portland who, you know, doesn’t really fit in this rap space as a name.”
Eventually, he uploaded music to SoundCloud and started working with local artists. His big break came on Bay Area rapper G-Eazy’s 2019 hit “West Coast,” featuring Blueface (a remix was later released with ALLBLACK and YG).
After moving to L.A., this time for good, he started working frequently in rap and R&B circles, developing a reputation for bringing warmth in unexpected ways, like on YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s “Kacey Talk.”
A chance meeting led him to become the first artist signed to the late Quincy Jones’s joint publishing venture with Scooter Braun. (LEWiS is now signed to Kobalt). Learning from Jones proved invaluable, as to this day, LEWiS seeks to emulate Jones’s holistic approach to artist development.
When It Rains, It Pours
“JULiA LEWiS, What’s poppin’?” Puerto Rican rapper Miky Woodz purrs on his 2023 hit “Por Mi Lau.” While a session with Venezuelan artist Vibarco sparked LEWiS’s urge to work more in Latin spaces, it was Woodz who led LEWiS to his Rimas Entertainment labelmate Bad Bunny. LEWiS, long a fan of música urbana, jumped at the chance when Woodz invited him to a songwriting camp in Puerto Rico.
After that session, more reggaeton and Latin artists came calling. “When it rains, it pours,” LEWiS quips. A month after “Por Mi Lau” was released, “Classy 101,” a song co-produced by LEWiS for Feid and Puerto Rican rapper Young Miko, came out. Peso Pluma, who was having a big year, liked what LEWiS did with “Classy 101” and tapped him for vocal production “Qlona” with KAROL G.
“I do a lot of vocal production, and if I want them to sing something a certain way, I’ll sing it out,” LEWiS says. “I think saxophone ear helps a lot with that, because the saxophone is one note at a time, higher register, breathy. It’s a voice.”
LEWiS has been getting more into contributing melodies and top lines, and in the near future, he plans to lean into his full repertoire of strengths and put together an album of his work featuring guest artists. But he still gets excited about driving the cutting edge of beatmaking.
“Some Latin artists are going in a direction of slightly Afrobeats,” LEWiS says, bringing up his work with Rawayana as an example. “Sonically, the rhythm, the feeling, the beachiness [is similar] in a way. There are concentric circles between a lot of newer Latin urban music and modern Afrobeats music.”
That type of cross-cultural blending lies at the heart of LEWiS’s artistry.
“Music is this amazing thing where it breaks down barriers of culture and of class and of political affiliation and perspective and just makes people feel good and feel connected to each other,” he says. “And I can’t think of many other things that one can contribute towards that have that effect. It’s humbling and special. And I aim to maintain that sort of desire as my North Star.”