The Mexican artist who is boosting Post Malone’s latest album

Listening to F-1 Trillion — the sixth album by rapper-turned-country singer Post Malone — is like being enveloped in the sounds of Nashville, Tennessee.

The album is loaded with collaborations from country music superstars, such as Dolly Parton, Tim McGraw, Chris Stapleton and Luke Combs. Paradoxically, however, the cover of this new bestseller doesn’t illustrate rural America. It’s a dreamlike scene that took place thousands of miles away from Tennessee, on a windless Tuesday morning. That day, on April 23, 2024, a 1971 Ford F100 pickup truck fell from the sky onto the Salto del Nogal Dam in Jalisco, Mexico.

That’s the portrait of a late-summer hit. F-1 Trillion is the new behemoth on the U.S. charts. Taylor Swift’s most recent album — The Tortured Poets Department — was displaced by Malone from its 15-week-long reign on the Billboard 200 chart.

The 29-year-old artist — whose real name is Austin Richard Ford — made his name rapping on tracks uploaded to SoundCloud, the digital platform that helped launch his career. By 2015, he was one of the new voices of the genre in the United States. But then, in May of that year, he tweeted that — before he turned 30 — he would become a folk and country singer.

He kept his promise. This year, Post Malone has left several clues about his transformation. In April, he swapped out his urban rapper outfit, instead adopting a cowboy look for Stagecoach (the festival that’s Coachella’s rural brother). His act was full of 1990s country anthems, a nod to the sounds that marked his childhood in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas. He was also seen at other festivals with various stars from the genre, including Morgan Wallen and Blake Shelton. The latter is the husband of Gwen Stefani and judge of the popular reality show The Voice. And he’s just one of the many country music celebrities who support Post Malone in his new adventure.

The image on the cover of F-1 Trillion is by the artist Gonzalo Lebrija, who was born in Mexico City in 1972. “It appeared to me like a kind of dream. I saw this idea and I became obsessed with making it into a photograph,” the artist says. He speaks with EL PAÍS from his home in Guadalajara, where he lives and works. The obsession ultimately became a work titled Brief History of Time (2008). The image captures a Valiant Duster — an American muscle car — in free-fall, plunging into a lake. It was taken with a film camera, which captured 150 frames per second.

For Lebrija, the image evokes a feeling of nostalgia for an era in which the automobile was one of the most important objects for humanity. “Cars gave you a sense of freedom, or a longing for freedom. Putting [a car] reflected against the water is a tribute to the end of an era,” Lebrija explains. The piece occupies a prominent place in a body of work full of playfulness, which makes constant references to the passage of time.

A Brief History of Time has found a great connection with the public. That’s why it’s had a series of iterations over the years. Lebrija even turned the scene into a sculpture. “The idea came to me to turn the vertigo-inducing experience that photographs provoke into a three-dimensional experience,” he explains.

History of Suspended Time: Monument for the Impossible (2010) was the result of this endeavor. It was displayed at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Colorado, for the Biennial of the Americas. The work later traveled to Marfa Contemporary — the famous art space in Texas, now shuttered — which dedicated an exhibition to Lebrija in 2015. In that city, near the border with Mexico, the vehicle suspended in the air was a 1968 Chevy Malibu. The Jumex Museum in Mexico City also had a similar version outside its main entrance in 2020.

It was one of these sculptures that caught Post Malone’s attention. The artist was one of the first to perform at the Fontainebleau, the most recently opened casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Malone gave two concerts there to ring in 2024. At the southwest entrance of the complex, a 1.1-ton 1966 Ford Galaxie in free-fall welcomes visitors. It’s the only permanent version of History of Suspended Time that currently exists.

Upon incorporating the work, the casino said that the sculpture “creates an uncanny, even sublime, effect, and encourages visitors to think about modern life and human aspiration.” That’s where the idea for the collaboration between Post Malone and Lebrija was born.

The rapper first proposed that the sculpture be made in Nashville, before being placed on the album cover. The idea of using a van was Post Malone’s. But time was too tight to achieve it before the album’s release. So, Lebrija suggested that he go back to photography. “I have a pickup truck just like the one I dropped and I suggested they throw it in the Tapalpa Dam… but then I felt bad about sacrificing my pickup and I started looking for [an alternative]. I found an identical one with a very good color and that’s the one that appears on the cover,” Lebrija specifies.

This time, the image was taken with a high-speed Phantom camera, like the one used in professional sports for super slow-motion shots. The machine captures 930 frames per second and requires an electric generator, because of the amount of energy it consumes.

The artist and his team had 90 minutes to capture the image. On April 23, they found a windless morning, when the water in the dam resembled a mirror. Lebrija has always considered A Brief History of Time to be an introspective work that also addresses the relationship between fragility and power.

Since August 16, the album’s cover has reached at least 250,000 people. It’s the second-biggest country music release of 2024 after Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter, which became a phenomenon four months ago.

Post Malone was so pleased with the image that his team turned the Ford F-100 into a ready-made advertisement, extending the impact of the work. The truck — with its hood already destroyed after the crash — made the trip north to be present at the launch events for F-1 Trillion. Many fans took selfies with it for social media. Post Malone has used a more open angle of the photo for an extended version of the album, titled F-1 Trillion: Long Bed. Finally, the truck from Jalisco ended its journey in Nashville.

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