ANGÉLICA GARCIA
ANGÉLICA GARCIA
ANSWERING THE CALL OF INTUITION
2024 was a breakthrough year for Los Angeles’ pop experimentalist Angélica Garcia. Not only the year she signed to Partisan Records and released third studio album ‘Gemelo’ (that would go on to receive accolades from The New York Times, Clash Magazine and The LA Times) – but the year she truly stepped into herself.
Written and produced during lockdown, the album that literally translates to ‘Twin’ represents the two selves, the spirit and body, and tackles how they work together and against one another – “It’s a reference to the fact that I believe that we as humans, have our body here, our flesh body in the physical world, but we also have like an intuitive self that is our twin,” Angélica explains. “So, we have two bodies, whether we acknowledge it or not.”
As she was working on this new collection of songs, Angélica found herself sitting in the silence more often than she had ever experienced. And though “silence is freaking scary,” it encouraged her to connect to the whisper of her intuition rather than giving in to the deafening noise of anxiety. “Art is how I made sense of things,” she recalls. “No one knows your life better than you do. I realised that a lot of the things I was raised under were almost giving me more fear and art was the place where I felt safe to ask the questions.”
The questions didn’t need much prompting. Raised in El Monte by Mexican and El Salvadoran parents, Angélica has been grappling with her identity, with her roots and her native tongue long before she made the active decision to write this third record in Spanish. “There’s a shame in speaking Spanish because our parents and grandparents had tried too hard to assimilate as immigrants,” she reveals. “But then, as I got older, it became painful not to speak Spanish: you can look like a whole-ass Latina, you can eat the foods, be a part of the culture, and then, at the same time, be removed from it because you don’t speak the way they do.”
“There’s a shame in speaking Spanish because our parents and grandparents had tried too hard to assimilate as immigrants. But then, as I got older, it became painful not to speak Spanish: you can look like a whole-ass Latina, you can eat the foods, be a part of the culture, and then, at the same time, be removed from it because you don’t speak the way they do.”
Her first two records – debut album ‘Medicine For Birds’ and vibrant follow-up ‘Cha Cha Palace’ that earned her a feature on Barack Obama’s end of year music list with ‘Jícama’ – were performed entirely in English. But, although these were defining moment for the young artist, Angelica didn’t feel that they were quite reaching her people. “Most of the people that I love the most in my life speak Spanish. This is such a core foundational part of why I am who I am, and I’ve always been afraid to express it because I was worried that my Spanish wasn’t good enough,” she reflects. “But being afraid of something is never good enough reason to not to do it.”
And it’s not just her living relatives that her music is now resonating with. During the songwriting process, Angelica unknowingly connected to her ancestors in a more spiritual realm. “I was sitting in my room, and I had just started this process of collecting the names of family members, like past ancestors, because I was just on this quest to find out where I’m from,” she recalls. “If you’re going to break these patterns you have to find out where they originate. I was doing that and this song just kind of dropped out of the sky. Two weeks later I find out, when speaking with my mother, ‘Oh, your great-grandmother Mama Juana, like Juanita.’ I didn’t get to her yet, so I didn’t realize that I had a great-grandmother named Juanita,” still echoing her disbelief about this discovery.
The music itself mirrors the depth of these spiritual excavations through avant guard electronic pop explorations, produced by Carlos Arévalo of Chicano Batman. His understanding of psych infused soundscapes perfectly aligning with the record’s earthy tones. “I wanted beats sounding like dirt getting kicked in your face, or synths that sounded very watery and cavernous, or rigid like rocks,” she explains.
All throughout the album she challenges traditional pop music idioms with a refreshingly universal rhythmic set of songs where heritage snaps into focus in both lyrics and sound. “Gemelo touches on a lot of different genres of Latino rhythm and music and some other pop and electronic and rock subcultures,” Angelica says about its wide-ranging influences. “But it never really confines itself to one genre.” Just as its creator doesn’t confine herself to one single culture.
With ‘Gemelo’ Angélica Garcia has succeeded in creating music that is searing and borderless, free of cultural confinement. Now, with growth and exploration like wind behind her, she has arrived at her clearest and most fully-realised vision of self.