Angélica Garcia - Gemelo (2024) [Official Digital Download]

Gemelo is the new album from songwriter and pop auteur Angélica Garcia. Its title is a reference to the twin self – the idea of a second, more intuitive self within. It’s a vibrant, prismatic hybrid-pop record that soundtracks a journey through the different stages and forms of grief. Angélica explores its inherent loneliness, beauty, and tension, eventually finding liberation. Gemelo also expertly deconstructs facets of universal themes like religion, spirit, heritage, womanhood, and ancestral veneration.

Born in East LA with Mexican and Salvadoran lineage, Angélica embodies the essence of contemporary America, a cultural landscape continually evolving through its fusion with rich Hispanic influences. In a reflection of modern America itself, Gemelo also marks Garcia’s first album sung almost entirely in Spanish, inviting listeners to reconsider what they think an American record can be.

Gemelo was produced by Carlos Arévalo of LA-based rock band Chicano Batman, his first time working in such a role. Sequenced with extreme intent, the album progresses from a delicate, tender entry on Side A which serves almost like a meditation, to the visceral intensity of Side B, which immerses into the difficult, at times terrifying work of healing. With growth and exploration like wind behind her, Garcia arrives at her clearest and most fully realized vision of self on Gemelo.

Gemelo is the anticipated follow-up to her 2020 breakthrough Cha Cha Palace, which featured on several year-end lists and brought Angélica to NPR’s Tiny Desk.

AllMusic Review by Matt Collar
With 2020's Cha Cha Palace, Angelica Garcia fused her indie rock sensibilities with her Mexican and Salvadoran roots, crafting an album of bold, hyper-colored art pop. The album's recording proved transformative for the singer/songwriter, provoking a move from her adopted home of Richmond, Virginia, back to her native Los Angeles, where she had grown up. There, she continued to delve into her heritage, going through a period of deep self-reflection as she questioned her ways of thinking and being in the world, both culturally and creatively. Sung almost entirely in Spanish, 2024's Gemelo is the culmination of that transformation, an album of pearlescent and kaleidoscopic dance anthems produced with Chicano Batman guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Carlos Arévalo. The title is Spanish for twin, a reference to both the Zodiac symbol Gemini, and the representation of the many dualities Garcia experiences in her life. Where Cha Cha Palace was vibrant, bombastic, and rough around the edges, Gemelo is sleek, built around pulsing synths, and spiraling electronic and analog percussion. There's a sense that Garcia has expanded her influences, mixing her art-punk inclinations with a yearning, theatrical sophistication that recalls artists like Kate Bush and Bat for Lashes. Central to the album is "Color de Dolor" or "The Color of Pain," a dizzying midnight club track where spiraling synths crash against a Latin-tinged electronic groove. Here, Garcia digs into her feelings of generational trauma while seeking artistic liberation, singing in Spanish, "What is the color of pain?/It moves in my body like a tide/Transforming, choking, ruthless/Even though I will never sever the tie with my pains, I paint them full of colors." Equally kinetic and dreamlike moments pop up elsewhere, as on the dub-inflected "Jaunita," the dusky, Giorgio Moroder-esque ballad "Mirame," and the buzzy electro-grunge of "Y Grito." Full of dark-hued emotions that speak to the self-examination and deconstruction Garcia went through, Gemelo is also bright with passion and artful musical experimentation.

Tracklist:
01 - Reflexiones
02 - Color De Dolor
03 - Juanita
04 - Ángel [eterna]
05 - Mírame
06 - Y Grito
07 - El Que
08 - Intuición
09 - Gemini
10 - Paloma


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