Angélica Garcia has been busy finding herself. Or, rather, her selves. The Los Angeles pop singer’s new record, “Gemelo” — twin in Spanish — is a rhythmic exploration of the spiritual world and our relationship to our inner, intuitive beings.
It also is a study of dualities, whether of culture, gender or language. For the first time, Garcia sings almost entirely in Spanish, something she first experimented with on 2020’s “Cha Cha Palace.” A move back to L.
A. from Virginia in the spring of that year led her to reconnect with her Latin heritage, and with it her ancestry. As a result, “Gemelo” is a fascinating mix of the mystical and the feminine, of self-love and grief, that glides effortlessly from synth-pop to cumbia to trip-hop.
Songs like “Color de Dolor” or “Juanita” slink and shimmy infectiously, even as they channel generational trauma or commune with the dead. “It really means a lot that I’m writing a song about intuition in Spanish and how it’s connected to our ancestry, and there are people in the audience that are like, ‘Yeah!’” Garcia says over a Zoom call, just after stepping offstage at a festival in Germany. “Maybe that’s my weirdo perspective, but that’s kind of what I do.
” On the heels of her album’s Friday release, Garcia discussed the upheaval that spawned the album, her difficulties writing in Spanish, and how creating the new songs helped her to know and assert herself better than ever before. There are al.
