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¿COMPRENDE?: With his smoky baritone, Tego is more indebted to Tupac Shakur than Shabba Ranks.

Those who find reggaetón grooves monotonous would have a hard time lodging that complaint with Tego. Despite all the dem bows — reggaetón’s prevailing rhythm — he offers a greater variety of styles than do most of his contemporaries, and not just his fellow reggaetoneros. Although it’s commonplace to describe reggaetón as a mix of hip-hop, reggae, salsa, and even such traditional Afro–Puerto Rican genres as bomba and plena, few reggaetón productions live up to this motley model. Tego is the exception: though it incorporates these influences, The Underdog breaks new ground.

Warning his challengers that he will return to “kill” them again and again, the lead single, “Los maté,” gestures to contemporary hip-hop and farther across the Latin musical spectrum by giving a classic Mexican ballad, “El preso número 9,” the chipmunk soul treatment. The track resolves its far-flung connotations with a solid reggaetón groove, layering chopped and filtered loops from dem bow and bam-bam riddims and adding subtle synths to fill out the texture. A fitting opening shot on his first album in three years, “Los maté” returns Tego to the vanguard of the genre, with an expansive, diasporic vision and a musical talent unconstrained by genre.

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In contrast to his peers, many of them participants in the dancehall-heavy pre-reggaetón underground or dem bow scene during the 1990s, Tego cut his teeth on hip-hop, in part while living in Miami as a teenager, and his flows and beats bear witness to an æsthetic steeped in that ol’ boom-bap. Whereas Daddy Yankee and similar vocalists spit double-time rhymes and strain their voices (purposely, mind you) to propel high-pitched melodies cribbed from dancehall reggae, Tego keeps it nonchalant in his smoky baritone, more indebted to Tupac Shakur than to Shabba Ranks. He’s more likely to cite Bob Marley as an influence than any dancehall DJ, and he’ll add the names of such seminal MCs as Rakim and such skillful soneros as Ismael “Maelo” Rivera, who gets a number of shout-outs on The Underdog. The album employs hip-hop beats alongside reggaetón pistas (accompanying tracks) and reggae riddims (of both dancehall and roots varieties), often infusing them with additional polyrhythmic percussion, evoking the traditional Afro–Puerto Rican and Afro-Caribbean styles Tego has been known to embrace and bringing hip-hop’s Afro-Latin roots back into the foreground by recalling the Latin-tinged funk breaks that provided a rhythmic foundation for the genre. Two acoustic interludes, “Son dos alas” and “Por qué,” make audible connections between Afro–Puerto Rican styles and the island’s most contemporary expressions.

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