yari

Miami · Puerto Rican, bilingual, cost-of-living pop · b. 2002 · FARA Records

Yari (Yaritza Rivera, b. 25 December 2002, Miami — yes, a Christmas baby) is a Puerto Rican kid raised between the island and the city, between Spanish and English, between her family's salsa-and-reggaeton records and the radio-pop on her phone. She grew up in a loud, warm, tight-knit household where money was always a little tight and humour was how you survived it. She learned early to code-switch — language, but also between keeping it light and feeling everything at once — and that became her whole sound: a joke and a panic attack in the same chorus.

She found music writing funny, too-honest songs about her actual life — rent, her overdraft, her situationships — and posting them, then finding that the most specific complaints (the grocery bill, the "where we going?" text when you're broke) were the most universal. She made being broke and bilingual and a little anxious sound like a party. Her influences run through the bilingual, genre-blending wave of modern latin-pop and reggaeton-influenced pop, crossed with the witty, relatable, confessional end of pop songwriting — the lineage that makes economic anxiety danceable.

On stage she's warm, hilarious and disarmingly real — the friend who turns her financial disasters into the best stories, then makes you dance about them. High-energy, bilingual and fourth-wall-breaking; she'll roast her own bank balance between songs. She goes by Yari because everyone always has — short for Yaritza, the name her mom still uses when she's in trouble. Warm, funny, frank.