XIOMARA

Miami, Florida · b. 2001 · FARA Records

XIOMARA (Xiomara Rivera, b. 23 February 2001) is from Miami, raised inside two languages at once, which is not the same thing as being bilingual. It means having two selves and knowing exactly which one is lying. English is the one she went to school in, works in, and keeps people out with. Spanish is the one that arrives when she's tired or telling the truth, and the one she cannot construct a decent lie in.

That isn't a fun fact about her; it's the entire subject of her music, and she's the rare writer who noticed it and then said so out loud. She came to it through the dembow under a sad song — the discovery that Latin music has always been perfectly comfortable putting a devastating lyric on top of something you can move to, and that the contradiction isn't a compromise but the point. She writes heartbreak you can dance to and has never once apologised for it.

Her voice is warm, smooth and bittersweet — close and conversational rather than belted, sensual in the sense of intimate and embodied, singing to herself as much as to anyone else. She switches between English and Spanish constantly, and the two do not sound the same coming out of her. Under her: reggaetón pop-soul, warm guitar, Latin percussion, finger snaps and a hint of strings that becomes a swell by the end.

Lucid, warm, unsparing. Not a woman falling apart in public — a woman describing, with total clarity, a thing she's doing to herself and doesn't intend to stop. That lucidity is the whole appeal and the whole tragedy. She knows. She has always known.