Rising up within the sierra of Andalusia, María José Llergo gained an schooling within the musical self-discipline of flamenco, surrounded by the neighborhood and spirituality of the individuals who helped create it. Her ability and approach are distinctive, proof of her classical coaching on the Catalonia College of Music, which she attended after leaving her hometown of Pozoblanco. Whereas flamenco is understood for being technically complicated and infrequently mythologized beneath the area of lone icons, within the lyrics and the expansive atmospheres Llergo crafts, she honors the style’s coronary heart. The folkloric fashion was consolidated within the area of Andalusia, and it has served as a car for Romani migrants who’ve confronted rampant discrimination in Spain to voice their struggles.

That resilient ethos seems in Llergo’s personal Romani heritage and Andalusian upbringing, a important element of the music that’s too usually misplaced within the flamenco that turns into most commercially profitable outdoors of Spain. Her imaginative and prescient, this time with a extra explicitly experimental bent towards digital music and R&B, succeeds as a result of it builds from this context as an alternative of shedding it. Llergo’s full-length debut Ultrabelleza, which interprets to “ultra-beauty,” displays a lyrical and musical command of the shape that many spend many years attempting to grasp—and emulate.

Her first mission, the 2020 EP Sanación (Spanish for “therapeutic”), launched her as an avant drive within the style. Her dedication to the observe of therapeutic is current in each factor of the writing right here. Lyrics function recurring motifs of flying, wind, and water—symbols of purification and liberating motion. However these lofty photos are grounded in dialogue of the struggles with poverty and discrimination that she’s confronted in her life. She lingers in propulsive beats and prolonged, reflective melismas, as if the music itself is an train in restore.

The album opens with a prayer to her grandmother performed on a cassette; the sound of it loading right into a tape deck transforms sublimely into the clatter of toes on the bottom, a conventional zapateo that introduces the next monitor, “Aprendiendo a Volar.” On “La Puerta Está Abierta,” she sings of a childhood grief that could be tough to recollect or acknowledge. Singing is the portal from then to now: “Cuando se abra la puerta, cuando se alce mi voz/El aire cruza la sierra de esta habitación.” (“When the door opens, after I elevate my voice/The air crosses the sierra, from this room.”) On the standout “Superpoder,” she visualizes flying over overdue payments and neighborhood whispers that she’s “damaged,” discovering energy within the music that sustained her. She sings, “Aprendí a llorar cantando/Aprendí a cantar llorando.” (“I realized to cry whereas singing/I realized to sing whereas crying.”) At instances, her heat voice actually reverberates towards modern drum machines and string sections, mixing the timelines of previous and current. As heavy as these introductory tracks are—they every function a ghostly Hammond organ, which disappears because the album builds in depth—they encapsulate the hope that exists on the opposite aspect. For Llergo, singing provides a chance to bear witness to therapeutic in all of its incarnations.