NEZZA

Nezza, born Vanessa Hernández, grew up in Southern California in a household steeped in salsa, drawing on her Dominican and Colombian heritage. She began posting song covers to YouTube in high school, then worked as a backup dancer in Los Angeles before starting to write and post her own material in 2018.

Her songs, including "Temporary," "Corazon Frio" and "Sola," move between English and Spanish, and she signed to Virgin Music Group in 2021. She built her early audience largely on the strength of her own writing; "Classy," released in 2025, was the first song she performed that she had not written herself.

In June 2025, amid that year's ICE protests, Nezza had been asked to sing the national anthem in English before a Los Angeles Dodgers game but chose instead to perform "El Pendón Estrellado," the anthem's official Spanish-language version, as a gesture of solidarity with immigrants. She said the Dodgers objected on the day itself despite having earlier been told of her plan, and that she was afterward barred from further performances at the ballpark.

The performance circulated widely and brought considerably more attention to her music. She followed it with the first studio-released recording of "El Pendón Estrellado," pledging all proceeds from it, and the lead-up to the performance became the subject of a documentary, La Tierra del Valor, which premiered at Sundance in 2026.