Album Review: El Mal Querer by Rosalía

Global bass, the internet-centric underground scene that began flourishing around the world in the late 2000s, emerged when young producers took their countries' folk traditions and updated them for a millennial dancefloor. They used new technology to connect previously collapsed musical boundaries: Cumbia became digitized (Colombia, Mexico), salsa got remixed (Puerto Rico, New York), pow wow drums went electric (Canada), and some producers even transmogrified Andean pan flutes into intellectual bangers. Global bass became a precursor to the increasingly boundless way pop music works now, even as it became flattened into limp and canned versions of what some people dreadfully termed "trop-house," not to mention the overall poisonous creep of EDM into its bloodstream.

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Latin pop has gone through many permutations and evolutionary changes over the last decade, becoming a new frontier in the creative arts. Rosalía Vila Tobella provides yet another direction on her sophomore full-length, El Mal Querer (The Evil Will). The Catalan-born, Barcelona-based singer, songwriter, actress, and dancer gained a Latin Grammy nomination for her 2017 date, Los Ángeles, an album that offered her own stripped-down take on flamenco and won her fans among the most popular artists in Latin pop -- including J Balvin, who enlisted her as a collaborator on his Top 20 single "Brillo" from Vibras.

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