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With a bassy voice and over a minimalist syncopated beat, Wilfredo “Willy” Aldarondo sings of lament. “The love of my life left for New York / my mother adopted my aunt, to Florida they went/packing my luggage, it is my flip now / the aircraft landed, and nobody clapped.”
These are the opening strains of “Tierra,” the main single off the Puerto Rican band Chuwi’s latest EP of the identical title. Based in 2020 within the northwestern coastal city of Isabela, Chuwi consists of Willy, his sister Lorén Aldarondo, his brother Wester Aldarondo, and good friend Adrián López. Describing the band’s sound is a problem in and of itself. Are they Latin jazz, indie rock, urbano, tropical fusion, or one thing else altogether? The reply to all of these questions is “sure.”
Over the previous two years, the quartet’s reputation has grown amongst listeners and trade friends. A part of that purpose is that they’ve seemingly crammed an all-too-common position in Latin American music: a band whose music echoes the activist sentiment of its technology.
“Tierra,” the track, makes unmistakable allusions to one in every of Puerto Rico’s most modern anxieties. In 2019, the Puerto Rican legislature handed Act 60, which codified beneficiant tax breaks for overseas buyers who transfer to the archipelago and set up themselves as residents.
The end result has led to what critics name a nationwide gentrification effort that has priced locals out of their very own neighborhoods. Swaths of actual property have been purchased and changed into short-term rental areas, which has, in flip, provoked skyrocketing housing prices; in the meantime, advantages that proponents of the act promised haven’t come to fruition. Between this, 2017’s disastrous Hurricane María, and the one-two punch of earthquakes and a pandemic in 2020, the inhabitants decline has been swift and extreme, inflicting much more dire results.
Chuwi’s lyrics resonate with Puerto Ricans who’re dismayed by what is going on round them. Puerto Rico has a sturdy historical past of music teams carrying their political leanings on their sleeves. Teams like Fiel a La Vega, Cultura Profética, and El Hijo de Borikén adopted the usual set by Argentina’s rock nacional and Chicano folks music, amongst different influences. Even reggaetón turned often known as “perreo combativo” throughout the 2019 protests on the island that pressured then-governor Ricardo Rosselló to resign.
However Chuwi is frank about how, regardless of appearances, they do not consciously establish as an activist band, even when their songs are likely to strike near the zeitgeist of political discuss on the island. As a substitute, the band sees themselves extra as artists placing their feelings on the web page relatively than preaching a selected ideology. “We write about what weighs on us, and we’re utilizing [music] as an outlet,” Willy says. “It is how we began. We simply needed a method to specific ourselves concerning the issues that make us uncomfortable or the issues we love.”
One other monitor on the EP, the merengue-tinged “Mundi,” places the listener within the tanned disguise of the actual Mundi. This African savannah elephant spent 35 years alone on the Dr. Juan A. Rivero Zoo of Puerto Rico, lower than an hour away from Isabela in close by Mayagüez. The elephant’s predicament turned a trigger célèbre amongst native animal rights activists, and Mundi was finally relocated in 2023 to an elephant sanctuary in Georgia.
For Chuwi, the track got here to be due to their proximity to the zoo, which they recall visiting throughout area journeys as children. It additionally serves as a homage to a track their mom would typically play: “Laika” by the Spanish ’80s pop band Mecano, concerning the Soviet area canine despatched on a doomed solo mission to outer area in 1957.
“We needed the track to be factual, so we truly investigated [Mundi’s backstory] however on the identical time, made it catchy, and if folks take note of the lyrics, then they will even be emotionally devastated,” laughs Lorén, who can be the band’s common lead singer.
Considered one of their most spectacular songs is “Guerra,” a palo Dominicano that channels frenzied Afro-Caribbean rhythms, creating an auditory sensory expertise that mimics the enveloping chaos of its namesake (“guerra” means “struggle”). Whereas struggle has certainly been on the forefront of the information for the previous seven months, that is one other occasion the place their muse was working subconsciously.
“We stay on this world, we’re uncovered to those issues, we’re keen about sure issues in our private lives, so musically [it bleeds in],” Lorén explains.
Their eclectic type and earnestness have drawn the eye of bigger acts. Grammy-winning producer Eduardo Cabra of the iconoclastic rap duo Calle 13 and artists like Buscabulla (“We name them mother and pa,” says Lorén) have suggested them of their nonetheless nascent stage as a younger band, for instance.
Seeing them stay reveals one more reason Chuwi has linked a lot with audiences. Lorén’s voice mesmerizes as she croons and wails with honeyed tones, and Adrián’s percussion simply will get folks’s blood pumping and feelings rising. In Lorén’s case, she digs into previous teachings from her days singing in church to completely contain listeners with the present she and her bandmates placed on.
“I rely rather a lot on emotion in my performances. If I do not really feel it, the viewers will not really feel it. In church, they taught us that if you sing one thing, you are singing to God, and if folks see your genuineness, then you definately’ll encourage them to sing to God, too,” she says. “When you’re weak, they will be weak as nicely. If I am not genuine, then how can I count on the group to attach with the music we’re creating?”
And whereas they hope their subsequent initiatives, together with a debut LP they’re already laborious at work on, exhibit extra of what they’re able to lyrically and sonically, they don’t seem to be about to shrink back from talking from the center, even when it would tag them as resistance artists.
“I feel it means our music is reaching folks. That what we really feel is not simply amongst us,” Wester says. “Seeing folks establish with it makes us really feel we’re not alone. I am nice with being perceived that method.”
Juan J. Arroyo is a Puerto Rican freelance music journalist. Since 2018, he is written for PS, Remezcla, Rolling Stone, and Pitchfork. His focus is on increasing the canvas of Latin tales and making Latin tradition — particularly Caribbean Latin tradition — extra seen within the mainstream.
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