The new Bad Gyal, The Smile, Kali Uchis and other albums of the month

Bad Gyal is never boring

By Xavi Sancho

If, in literature, the how is many times more interesting than the what, in pop almost everything has to do with the when. Bad Gyal's career is a tour de force which started about eight years ago in order to synchronize with the times of the industry and the public. As with any artist worth his salt, his early years were uneven in this regard. Alba Farelo i Solé was going too fast or in directions somewhat opposite to those taken by audiences, executives and algorithms. Little by little, she managed to make a place for herself. Partly, because some of her contemporaries went fishing in distant seas where she had not lost anything at all and, partly, also because practice makes perfect and at the beginning of this decade Bad Gyal was almost perfect being Bad Gyal.

Now he is releasing his debut album itself, beyond dozens of singles and several mixtapes with which he managed to go from being that type of artist whose name everyone knows and almost no one knows the songs, to synchronizing his fame with his rhymes. And if until recently the question was when the Bad Gyal album comes out, right now, and after listening to it, what is more difficult to answer is why a Bad Gyal album has come out. Only if Neil Young gets a tiktok It will all make sense again. It's not that the Catalan doesn't have the right to have her album, it's that she doesn't need it at all.

The jewel It's not a bad album at all. Quite the opposite. It contains a considerable number of songs solved with tremendous success, but it is not an album, it is something else. Rather, it is a playlist something crazy that contains 50% of already known songs, a production that tends to soften more than desired, an excessive popular vocation and, above all, it does not know how to fill the gaps it leaves, because if something defines the approach to the music of artists like Bad Gyal is the inability to be bored and bored. Nobody says the word so many times ass if you don't intend to stay awake until the sun rises.

Among what we have already tasted before, a 'Chulo pt.2' with Tokischa and Young Miko, which is pure fire, 'Real G' with Quevedo or that 'Sexy', a banger with a Fakeguido in command and in a state of grace that He's been busting tracks since the middle of last year. Of the new stuff, ' Así soy ', with Morad, sounds a bit like a missed opportunity, and 'Mi lova', with Myke Towers, is as inane as he is. On the other hand, the appearance of El Guincho and Anitta in 'Bota Niña' is tropicalism and twerking of the first division. That moment also triumphs dancehall which since her visit to Jamaica in 2018 is unavoidable in the idiosyncrasy of the Catalan, one of its main differentiating facts. Recorded with Tommy Lee Sparta, it almost alone justifies the existence of this artifact with a soul of playlist and body of an album that is very likely to end up selling thousands of copies on vinyl. And, who knows, maybe in five years we will look back and find in it a meaning that we cannot find now or we do not dare to verbalize, like, just like that, it is the testament of an era. To say something.

Life after Radiohead

By Iñigo López Palacios

The Smile

Wall of Eyes
XL Recordings / Popstock!

Less than two years ago, the debut of The Smile, the pandemic trio composed of Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke with drummer Tom Skinner, was criticized for seeming like a minor Radiohead album. Another of those entertainments that the band members have accustomed us to during the breaks of their main group. But this silence is being extremely long. In May it will be eight years since the publication A Moon Shaped Pool, although we must take into account the two years of covid. Already then there was speculation that this album was a farewell. We believed it was fair; Radiohead's albums have always been over-analyzed in the search for almost gnostic keys. Now it doesn't seem so far-fetched that it was goodbye. For now, another piece can be added to that theory: The Smile has developed its own personality. It's not that they are suddenly a different group, but that they have evolved. After touring since 2022, they seem to fit in very well and believe in what they are doing without feeling obliged to satisfy old debts.

Recorded at Abbey Road, they are no longer produced by Nigel Godrich, the sixth Radiohead, but by Sam Petts-Davies, engineer of the quintet since 2015 and producer of the soundtrack of Suspiria which Yorke signed. Wall of Eyes It is a beautiful work, full of groove and treats like the flute of 'Teleharmonic' or the strings of 'Bending Hectic'. Freed from the heavy burden of the past, they have made an album that does not take great formal risks, but that delivers delicious melodies, possibly some of the best they have written in a decade. It's been a while since Yorke has sung in such a natural way, Greenwood is brilliant, and Skinner is especially loose in his jazz sensibility. There is no shortage of moments of guitar disengagement that refer to kraut seventies, intensity, darkness and those JG Ballard apprentice lyrics common to Yorke. It is a record that moves between light and darkness naturally. And since with these guys you never know if this thing has an expiration date, it's best to enjoy The Smile while they're still around.

Sleater-Kinney's fighting spirit

By Laura Fernandez

Sleater-Kinney

Little Rope
Loma Vista / Music As Usual

No one has preserved the fighting spirit of his team like Sleater-Kinney. riot grrrlism initial, a punk rock
that, in this eleventh studio album, shows itself to be sophisticatedly evolved and at the same time extremely pure – pay attention to songs like 'Needlessly Wild' or the more expansive and brilliant 'Hunt You Down'. No, they are not all there anymore — the trio formed by Corin Tucker, Carrie Brownstein and Janet Weiss in a very unfeminist 1994 is, since 2019, a duo: the third left it — but, in some way, they keep intact, aesthetic and plastically, a rock that wants nothing to do with the passage of time – 'Hell' is the best example – and that, when it does, it is to become appropriately muscular and epic, as in 'Untidy Creature'.

The Castilian cadence of Kali Uchis

By Beatriz G. Aranda

Kali Uchis

orchids
Geffen / Universal

'Just like an angel' could be the most important song on Kali Uchis. 'Telepathy', with more than a billion views on Spotify, was the single that launched her to stardom in 2020, but this new collaboration with Peso Pluma perfectly exemplifies the current context of Latin pop: it maintains the pulse of tradition and the mix with R&B and trap, using the cadence of Spanish as a distinguishable sound element. The rest of the album delves into that same formula: grooves powerful, cumbia and reggaeton rhythms, and guests like Rauw Alejandro and Karol G. orchids, named after the national flower of Colombia (the country his father comes from), it only falters in the narrative, with somewhat flat messages of love and seduction.

Brittney Spencer's maximum expectation

By Fernando Neira

Brittney Spencer

My Stupid Life
Elektra/Warner

Aired for years as a shining star of the new country-pop, Brittney Spencer signs a debut album that comes after a single EP and a not very extensive string of singles scattered throughout the calendar. The expectation is maximum, and its loud voice, irrefutable. The device, born from the factory of producer Daniel Tashian (Kacey Musgraves), seems designed to the millimeter to overwhelm the general public, but the result leaves room for dissent. Songs as pristine as they are without substance, the kind that you can see coming from the first seconds. Stories of overcoming that feed the biographies, but are not enough to scratch. Square and bevel ballads ('Bigger Than the Song') and airs like the first Taylor Swift. She will sweep.

The guitar to think by Dani de Morón

By Silvia Cruz Lapeña

Dani from Morón

Empathy
Self-published

To understand the other, they don't even have to be there. Dani de Morón says something like this with Empathy, where he does the exercise of accompanying an imaginary singer or singer with his guitar. In this way, she offers, as she already did in Believe to see (2020), different levels of interpretation and listening. Because although it is true that his compositional skill and his touch push you to think more than to dance, this album will also please those who are not looking for depth: it is beautiful, without more. It also has, once again, the exquisite percussion of Agustín Diassera, whose presence and weight in Empathy They prevent referring to him as a companion. Another proof of how Morón understands music: as a whole in which nothing, neither musicians, nor notes nor flamenco, is left to chance.

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