For Samurai Jay, his connection to Latin music began at home. He credits his mother with shaping his musical tastes from a young age.

Born and raised in Naples, Italy, the 27-year-old artist — whose name is Gennaro Amatore — vividly remembers dancing to Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina” at age 8. Still, when it came time to pursue a music career of his own, he gravitated toward other genres before finding his way back to those influences.

“Here and there, I always made reggaetón songs or songs with the Latin vibe, but I never took that path seriously because I like to do everything,” explains Jay during an interview with Billboard from his home in southern Italy. “I come from metal music. I come from rock music. I [experimented] with every genre…literally.”

Today, Samurai Jay is one of the leading voices behind merenguetón in Italy, a genre that fuses the fast-paced rhythms of Dominican merengue with the urban edge of reggaetón. Among the country’s most visible Latin music artists, he has helped introduce the sound to a broader audience through a distinctive style, crafted in collaboration with local producer Vito Salamanca and songwriter Luca Stocco.

Samurai Jay is currently the No. 1 artist in Italy, after his high-energy Italian-Latin hit “Ossessione (Obsession)” took over the country early this year. The song, which features merenguetón with Italian lyrics and a few phrases in Spanish, made its official, high-profile debut on stage at the Sanremo Music Festival, which ran from Feb. 24-28, before rolling out globally across all major digital streaming and download platforms.

“We were the underdogs of the festival, and then things just blew up,” says Jay, who describes the exposure the track and performance received at the festival as “almost too overwhelming.”

“Ossessione” entered the Billboard Italy Hot 100 on March 7, making its debut at No. 5, before climbing to No. 1 spot the very next week and currently still reigning on the chart after 16 weeks on top.

On Spotify alone, the song was getting 1.3 million [global] streams per day,” he recalls of the song’s first week of release. “And of course the numbers go down a little bit after Sanremo, but the thing is it’s still [at a] record [high] right now in Italy.”

While the artist became a viral merenguetón sensation in 2026, he has spent the past year producing Latin music.

In spring 2025, Jay, Salamanca and Stocco — both of whom worked on the production and songwriting for the album — found themselves in the studio doing what they describe to Billboard as “having fun and playing with guitar sounds” and Latin beats. The sessions yielded their first hit, “Halo.” The song laid the groundwork for what would become their signature blend of Italian urban music and merenguetón.

“Halo was the song that blew up, and that actually opened the way for what we’re doing today,” explains Jay, who saw the audience’s receptiveness as the compass he needed to move forward musically.

“We started to take it seriously,” he adds. “We were like, ‘Okay, let’s try to do our version of this kind of sound’ because I think it fits with our vision and my tone of voice — it just matches.”

While fully acknowledging that the rhythms in his current musical works are Latin-derived, he likes to refer to this fusion of sounds as Latino Mediterraneo.

“It’s a cool crossover between the Latin culture and our roots. We are from Naples — we are from the south, and I think that actually Latin Americans and Neapolitans are quite the same people; the vibe, the energy, la vibra es la misma,” says Jay.

In May 2026, Jay released his second studio album Amatore. The album entered the Billboard Italy Albums Top 100 charts on June 6 at No. 3 and is currently sitting at No. 7, below Bad Bunny’s Debi Tirar Mas Fotos.

Jay’s rise in Italy has drawn comparisons to the breakthrough moment that launched Grammy-award-winning Latin pop singer Laura Pausini‘s career in the early ’90s. After winning the newcomers’ category at Sanremo with “La Solitudine” in 1993, Pausini quickly became a household name in Italy, before expanding her reach internationally through a Spanish-language version of the song. More than three decades later, Jay is building a similarly widespread following, introducing Latin sounds to a new generation of Italian listeners.

Italian music icons are taking notice of Samurai’s impact.

“Everyone from Eros Ramazotti, Tiziano Ferro, Laura Pausini — the goats, the people I look up to in Italy that made it worldwide — all showed up and paid me respect,” says Jay.

Italy, primarily the south, is known for its affinity for heavily Latin rhythms, such as bachata, reggaetón, merengue and now merenguetón. Song streams spike in the summer. Along with producers Salamanca and Stocco, they say they want to change that.

“There’s this misconception [in Italy] that you can do reggaetón only for the summer, and it is the right moment to let people know that Latin music is not just summer music,” says Jay. “This is not just a summer genre. It’s the whole year round. Music is music, and the energy you put into it is the key. It’s not the genre. So this is why we’re number one right now, I think, because we did it effortlessly. We just were having fun as kids when we were creating and playing with music, playing with instruments; we just love what we do.”

While he plans to tour Europe over the summer, the artist, along with Salamanca and Stocco, is traveling to Puerto Rico and Miami to find inspiration for their next project. In the meantime, there are a few Latin artists who sit at the top of his list of dream collaborations.

“I think it would be fun to have a song maybe with Rauw [Alejandro]; it would probably be dope because I think our voices will fit great, or Romeo Santos, maybe, on a Bachata,” he adds, also mentioning Bad Bunny and Young Miko as being in his wish-list.

Jay is currently touring through Europe, but his main goal is to tour globally.

“It’s the only thing I really dreamed of. Right now I’m at the top of the game in Italy — I don’t want to say it so it’s too loud,” he jokes. “But my main thing is — it’s fun to be here, but I grew up looking up to artists overseas, and I always dreamed of being an international artist.“

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