Грэммийн шагналт уран бүтээлч Матео Сужатович аялан тоглолтын шинэ хэлбэрээ танилцууллаа

No matter when you read this, odds are that Mateo Sujatovich is keeping busy. The Grammy-winning Argentine musician behind Conociendo Rusia has carved out a reputation as someone who is always up to something. A song to write, a record to make, a video to shoot, a tour to play.

Back in June 2024, for example, he went viral after staging an impromptu concert in Madrid’s Parque del Retiro. Some 400 fans reportedly showed up after Sujatovich floated the idea on social media earlier that day. There was no official show on his itinerary that night. In fact, his Spanish tour wouldn’t begin until November. Mateo played because he doesn’t seem to be able to stop.

“I’m 35, what do you want me to do?” he tells me during a conversation for Consequence. “I mean, if I don’t work now, if I don’t bust my ass now, when am I going to do it? I have the energy, I have the drive. I like doing it.”

These days, Mateo is, for lack of a better word, busy again, preparing for a very different kind of tour from what his fans are used to. Appropriately titled Conociendo Rusia presenta Mateo, his upcoming shows will find him performing in a solo format, with stripped down versions of many of the hits that have made him one of the region’s most popular acts.

“Performing alone is a beautiful thing, and it’s also something that comes very naturally to a songwriter,” he explains. “I don’t need a drummer to sing my songs. I don’t need a bass player to sing my songs. I need myself.”

The truth is that behind the “restless” label lies something deeper: Mateo’s aversion to repetition. His upcoming tour isn’t even his first one going solo: he played more than 20 cities in that format back in 2023. Changing it up is essential to keeping things interesting for him. “I already went everywhere with the band last year. What am I going to do this year? The same thing again? Nah, let’s do something different.”

Constant movement, however, doesn’t mean rushing. Earlier this year, during an interview with Spain’s Los 40, he was asked about his creative process and acknowledged feeling the pressure of an industry where “everything moves very fast” while he moves “at a different speed.”

“Songs take time,” he said at the time. “I trust my own needs more than the pace the industry sets to keep the metrics from dropping. You can’t really create something on demand. “At the end of the day, I do this because I need it too.”

Mateo’s perspective on the music business stems, in part, from the fact that he’s been around it since before he could even speak. His father, Leo Sujatovich, is a pianist, composer, arranger, and producer who spent part of the 1980s playing keyboards alongside Argentine rock legend Luis Alberto Spinetta, before going on to a career that has included film scores, orchestral works, and collaborations with some of the biggest names in Argentine music. Music, in other words, was less something Mateo discovered than something that was always there.

Eventually, some of the musicians Mateo grew up admiring became his own collaborators. Fito Páez, the Argentine icon whom Mateo first saw in concert when he was seven years old, joined him on 2021’s “Tu Encanto,” while Uruguayan songwriter Jorge Drexler appeared on “Desastres Fabulosos,” a collaboration that earned them a Latin Grammy in 2025.

But their influence on Mateo hasn’t been limited to the music itself. It also extends to the way they’ve continued finding different ways to express themselves throughout their careers. “It’s good to look around and say, ‘Well, this guy did it this way, this guy did it that way,’” he says.

And Mateo does a lot of looking around. Over the course of our conversation, he casually references everyone from Natalia Lafourcade and Rufus Wainwright to John Mayer and Arctic Monkeys, comparing how they perform, how often they release albums, and how their careers have evolved. He comes across, in that sense, as a student of the craft, constantly taking note of the different paths available to an artist without losing sight of his own. “In the end, your path is your path,” he says. “It doesn’t look like anybody else’s.”

Increasingly, however, he finds himself on the other side of that equation. For the upcoming tour, he has launched “Mateo te presenta a vos,” an initiative that invites emerging musicians from each city he visits to apply for the chance to open his show. His team preselects local acts before turning the final decision over to a public vote.

“What I’m really looking for with this is to give young artists in each city a space to sing, to play their music,” he explains. “Getting those opportunities generally isn’t easy. And today, I’m in a position where I can provide that space.”

The Mateo tour currently has 22 dates on the books, beginning September 4th in Rosario and taking Sujatovich through Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Colombia before wrapping up in Bogotá on November 29. And if that sounds like a lot for someone touring without a band, it might only be the beginning: the tour has been billed as eventually reaching more than 50 cities across 19 countries.

And then what, I ask. Rest, maybe?

“You know what happens? What scares me about it is that when I finally do it, I’m going to like it a lot,” he says with a smile. “Once I’m actually there, I’ll be like, ‘Wow, why didn’t I do this before?’”