No one could accuse Kali Uchis of wasting time. The tour to promote her third album, Red Moon on Venus, ended a matter of weeks ago – with a performance at Camp Flog Gnaw, the festival curated by her sometime collaborator Tyler, the Creator – and yet here is its follow-up. She announced its arrival – or rather she announced a “new era” for her music – back in July, a mere four months after Red Moon in Venus came out.
Perhaps, like persisting in calling new albums “eras”, this is just the way artists do things these days: in a world of constant distractions, overburdened with new music, you can’t afford to hang about for fear that the audience will move on to someone else. Or perhaps it has something to do with the artist’s history. Orquídeas is the second predominantly Spanish-language album released by Uchis, who spent her childhood shuttling between America and Colombia. The first, Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios), came out in 2020, apparently much to the consternation of her record label, who cautioned against releasing it – advising her to ditch the cumbia and boleros and concentrate on making something that sounded more like her breakthrough hit, the R&B-flavoured After the Storm – and then, according to Uchis at least, refused to support or promote it. The album failed to chart.
That, however, was before her song Telepatía was taken up as the soundtrack to a lip-sync challenge on TikTok and it became the first track by a Latina artist to break the 1bn streams barrier on Spotify. It’s hard to avoid the sense that Uchis now feels emboldened to do exactly as she pleases, without interference, and that the speedy release of Orquídeas – recorded in tandem with Red Moon in Venus – may come with a distinct tang of: “How do you like them apples?”
Or perhaps Uchis just wanted Orquídeas out quickly because she thinks it’s a really good album, in which case she has a point. It diverts into traditional Latin-American musical styles – bolero on the closing Dame Beso / Muevete, dembow on Muñekita – while the single Labios Mordidos smartly sticks a reggaeton beat under a wiry synth riff of the type deployed by Dr Dre in his early 00s productions, alongside bursts of reggae’s legendary 70s Stalag riddim. There are moments when the Latin influence appears to be almost negligible, as on Tu Corazón es Mío, a beautiful but straightforward soul ballad with a hint of Philadelphia International lushness; if you strain your ears, you can just about make out the scrape of a drumstick along a guiero somewhere in the mix, but that’s about it. The album’s signature style is set out on opener ¿Cómo Así?, which starts not unlike a track from the largely downtempo Red Moon in Venus – soft-focus and ethereal, pillowy synths and distant, echoing vocals – before a pacy dancefloor beat unexpectedly crashes in, driving the track along.
This is the immensely appealing sound that Orquídeas primarily deals in, retooling Uchis’s trademark hazy tones with club-focused rhythms: four-to-the-floor pulses derived from house music, mid-tempo disco on Igual Que un Ángel, the offbeat stutter of reggaeton, a vaguely trap-like drum machine snap that cuts through the 80s synth-soul ballad Perdiste. It’s an approach that really works. If you had to level a criticism at Red Moon in Venus, it might be that the album seemed to prize the creation of a mood over songs: its fuzzy warmth was enveloping, but it could feel a little samey, tracks slipping pleasantly by without leaving an individual impression. Here, the mood is similarly dreamy, but there’s more variety and the beats add urgency and propulsion.
She continues to show off her flair for steely, coolly devastating lyrics: “You lost me, how sad … oh, that must hurt,” opens Perdido. ¿Cómo Así? and Diosa are both about bringing men to heel (“Make ’em beg for it,” suggests the former, while the latter swaggers “I’m a total goddess … with me he’s submissive”), a theme returned to on Helado, which has Uchis demanding both ice cream and a foot rub and referring to her (male) partner as “my little princess”. Labios Mordidos offers a lust-racked paean to lesbianism, its attentions focused on a “Tarantino movie doll”. Unexpectedly, No Hay Ley, Parte 2 mentions 90s Belgian pop-house merchants Technotronic as the perfect soundtrack to a postcoital spliff: winningly, it rhymes their name with a line that translates as “my abdomen is iconic”.
So it’s dreamy and fuzzy but sharp, witty and danceable with it; varied but coherent, consistently enjoyable. It’s an album on which Kali Uchis sounds not just like an artist who is now doing exactly what she wants, but one who also knows exactly what she’s doing.
This week Alexis listened to
Sheer Mag – Moonstruck
From the Philadelphia quartet’s first album in five years, Moonstruck strikes the perfect balance between raw punk attitude, 70s soul and sugary pop sweetness.
