NYC-based artist Angélica Garcia offers up a rapturous journey into the self on a new pair of tracks/music videos for “Y Grito” and “El Que.” She’s also currently on tour with a handful of U.S. dates that fans can catch her at before the end of the year. The new music and visuals arrive with her recent signing to Partisan Records, marking a new era in the pop auteur’s eclectic growth.
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On “Y Grito” — which was originally released late last year in the aftermath of her Echo Eléctrico EP — Garcia stirs up a maelstrom of Latin punk and visceral electronica. From within its volatile roiling of percussion, she orchestrates a dually perilous but energizing confrontation with the “shadow side” of herself.
Directed by the team at *UNCANNY, the newly released music video for “Y Grito” imagines this reckoning as an unnerving, adrenaline-pumping battle of wills. One that plays out in the black-and-white film as an erratically transfixing dance that at times appears reminiscent of a self-induced exorcism. Garcia’s bewitching form and frantic gesticulations channel the song’s ferocious spirit toward a a feverish purification.
“El Que” is the newest of the two singles and serves as a companion song/video to “Y Grito.” A seismic release of shuddering bass rhythms and frenetic sonics, the song articulates the internalized fortitude that comes with being a woman in a masculine world that seeks to devour and harm the feminine. “Keeping myself and my body safe as a woman is such a careful dance that I often play out in my head,” Garcia said of the single. “Like a lion tamer facing a lion.”
The music video for “El Que” — also directed by *UNCANNY — answers the bodily visuals of the “Y Grito” film with a wraithlike counterpart. Although there are shots of Garcia dancing, nearly all of the monochromatic scenes hone in on her shadow as it shakes in the pulsating and eerie light of hallway walls. Her movements are vigorously purposeful and brimming with the same incendiary vitality that thrums from the track’s ecstatic soundscape.
Both songs were produced by Carlos Arévalo (Chicano Batman) and feature Garcia singing entirely in her native Spanish, the same language she first learned to sing rancheras with her family. Emblematic of the fierce expulsions of emotion that burst from her music, the vocals for “Y Grito” and “El Que” were done in one take and were so taxing that she couldn’t sing for two days.
Words: Steven Ward
Visit Angélica Garcia on their Bandcamp, TikTok, and Instagram to stay updated on new releases and tour announcements.
Angélica Garcia tour
24 OCT – Denver, CO – Gothic Theatre
25 OCT – Santa Fe, NM – Meow Wolf
27 OCT – Austin, TX – Mohawk
28 OCT – Dallas, TX – Studio at the Factory
08 DEC – New York, NY – Irving Plaza
09 DEC – Washington DC – Howard Theatre
