A few months after experiencing motherhood for the first time, Chilean singer-songwriter Francisca Valenzuela began planning a new album. Over Zoom, suffering from exhaustion and postpartum depression, she spoke to a trusted collaborator about making
an exuberant party record that would channel the bubbly physicality of Italian icon Raffaella Carrá. “Fran, are you sure you wanna do this?” the producer replied.
The 39-year-old artist changed gears and decided to focus instead on her ongoing emotional breakdown. One of life’s most cruel impositions is that new mothers are expected to sport a beatific smile of perpetual bliss while the hormones are wreaking havoc with body and mind. “I curse the day in which I was born/I curse the day in which I gave birth/I curse my own youth/My eternal ineptitude,” Valenzuela bites back on “Maldita” (Cursed), the album’s title track. The real surprise here is not the unflinching nature of the lyrics, but how gorgeous her vocals and piano sound now that she allows herself the catharsis of letting go.
Anyone familiar with Valenzuela’s previous art-pop gems Vida Tan Bonita (2022) andAdentro(2024) will tell you that she’s an obsessive perfectionist (once, after messing up a keyboard line during a show, she insisted on playing the entire song from the beginning so that she could get it right.) The delicious paradox of Maldita is that while the lyrics and spoken word passages trace the spiraling fracture of a self-professed “hysterical witch,” the music itself shimmers with regal precision and grace.
On “Malacara,” the orchestral backdrop acts like the chorus of a Greek tragedy, echoing her doubts through dissonance and ominous melodic turns. The arrangement of lead single “Buganvilia” is as saturated as the narrator who feels her mind slipping away while the bougainvillea flowers outside. On the sweeping “No Te Aburras De Mí,” she prays that her partner won’t get tired of their life together.
By the end of Maldita, she has weathered the storm and embraced a new life. “Nací Necesitándote” is the kind of heart-melting ode to her baby daughter that could have only germinated after dealing with the pain inside. On “Komorebi,” a Japanese word that acknowledges the fleeting beauty of nature, her contentment feels earned. Far from cursed, Valenzuela is one of the most generous artists of her generation — and a Latin American treasure.
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