Lido Pimienta – Caribenya
The trailblazing GRAMMY-nominated multidisciplinary artist Lido Pimienta —with a practice spanning music, performance, and visual art – is announcing Caribenya today, a new album steeped in everything Pimienta has always been about: connection, resistance, and a desire to push sonic boundaries.
Coming out July 17, the lead track is “Tóxica”, a diatribe against bad friendship set to a fiery cumbia. The classic Afro-Indigenous revolt rhythm, one Pimienta is a modern master of, is sharpened by her soaring vocals, ethereal harp plucking, a warm viola, a sonidero’s command to dance, and electronic melodies that blow up the song to bursting, rage transmuting into forgiveness.
Always a creator of stunning visuals, Pimienta’s video for the song features ‘The Blair Witch Project’-esque forest footage, men made of grass and cameos from her own daughter and son.
The new album’s title is a playful portmanteau of the word “Caribe” and “Enya”, a nod to the mysterious Irish singer Pimienta is a fan of. The esoteric figure of Enya has loomed over Pimienta, who listens to her music to concentrate while writing. Often compared to Björk and Natalia Lafourcade in part due to her scope, generation, and ambition of her work, Pimienta prefers to align herself with the legendarily reclusive ambient diva before anyone else.
Caribenya synthesizes the lessons of last year’s orchestral album ‘La Belleza’ and the decolonization of traditional European music into a truly human, global work. As firmly rooted in the Latin American and Caribbean anti-colonial concerns Pimienta has explored throughout her career, it is an album that relies on joyous resistance, on the moments of escape on the dancefloors and beaches and living rooms of our loved ones as the world burns. Don’t call it escapism (or worse, theorizing) — this is one of alternative music’s great experimentalists letting just a little loose while never losing sight of the greater issues at hand. ‘La Belleza’ and Caribenya will be released together as a double LP on gold vinyl.
“Someone told me that making a classical album was gonna be impossible for me and I did it, an “impossible-only-Europeans-could-ever-do-this album”; ‘Caribenya’ is the counterpart where I got to be less cerebral and have more fun,” she says of the new album. “With my friends, I’m more collaborative, because I usually work alone; it has a sense of joy and collaboration that is very Caribbean. It’s like ‘come over and hang. You don’t need to set up an appointment, you can just knock on the door.’”
TOUR DATES
July 9 – Burlington, ON @ Royal Botanical Gardens
Sept 15 – Seattle, WA @ Neumos
Sept 16 – Portland, OR @ Wonderland Ballroom
Sept 18 – San Francisco, CA @ Bimbos 365
Sept 19 – Los Angeles, CA @ Ford Theatre
#lidopimienta