Grease, the second album from 29-year-old Argentinian singer and rapper Nathy Peluso, opens with “Corleone,” a sumptuous, old-fashioned bolero. An excerpt from John Barry's dream 007 “From Russia With Love” transforms into a feverish groove that would make La Lupe proud. “This ambition is killing me,” sings Peluso, her voice in full bloom.
“Corleone” is a somewhat disorienting opening track. Like most of Peluso's music, it's both edgy and comfortably familiar. honest to the core, but with a thin layer of irony underneath.
“I wanted to get back to my roots,” Peluso says during a Zoom meeting from Barcelona. “This album was about finding my fundamental pillars – and the worlds of bolero, ballad, and Latin folk sums up the essence of who I am. 'Corleone' was the first song we recorded for this album and I tend to treat those magical moments with respect. It's like a caress that pulls you in. a shot of whiskey that invites you to sit back, enjoy, listen to some music.”
There is a cinematic stream Grease, and the radical changes in his style are intentional. A brash, magnetic performer, Peluso effortlessly transitions from the frantic rap of single “Aprender a Amar” to a reverent foray into traditional salsa, “Presa,” sung without the slightest trace of postmodern irony. He boasts elaborate vocal gymnastics on the art-pop moment 'Escaleras de Metal' and experiments with Brazilian rhythms on 'Menina'.
“Nathy is amazing at putting all these different sounds together and her lyrics are amazing,” says singer Lua de Santana, who collaborated with Peluso on “Menina.” “I think on this album she reveals a lot about herself that she hasn't shown us before.”
But the way to Grease it was not smooth at all. After its release Calabriaher critically acclaimed 2020 debut, Peluso recorded a collection of songs she abandoned when she became disaffected.
“I killed an entire album to do this,” she admits, declining to name the title of the unreleased project. “At first I experienced it as a loss, a failure, but it was actually the best thing that could have happened — the biggest learning experience possible,” he says.
He continues, “It doesn't take everything we do to see the light of day. It was an album that taught me how to produce, coming to terms with the songs I was looking for, but from a different perspective. I just wasn't feeling it and dropping it was the best option. The whole process took about four years.”
Peluso had recorded 20 songs and only four made it Grease. It was veteran rock star Fito Páez — its creator El Amor Después del Amoran inevitable point of reference for young Argentine artists — who inspired Peluso to start anew.
“He didn't tell me to kill the record or anything like that,” he explains. “Fito is my idol, but also my best friend, one of the most special relationships in my life. He told me I needed a new context for my music and I really listened to him. I came out of this crisis through the process of creating new music.”
Stubbornly following her own muse has been a trademark of Nathy Peluso since the beginning of her career, when she was a teenager posting covers online. (Her homemade renditions of “Cry Me A River,” “Crazy” and “Summertime,” recorded seven years ago, are still on her YouTube account.)
Fall 2020 marked a turning point in her career. It was released in October Calabria, his menacing trap workouts spat in a mysterious, made-up pan-Latin accent that drew some criticism online. But Peluso could also sound tender and vulnerable, displaying a mainstream rock sensibility on “Buenos Aires,” a more harmonically conventional tribute to the melancholic poetry found in the homeland she left behind when she left Argentina and moved to Spain with her family.
A few weeks after the fall Calabria, went viral as a guest star in one of the sessions produced by Argentinian wunderkind Bizarrap. A combination of slick, trippy auto-tuned choruses and an outrageously intense barrage of rhymes (“qué buena vista tenés cuando me ponés en cuatro patas” is the track's now iconic album opener), “BZRP Music Sessions #36” is Bizarrap's third most popular song on YouTube, behind Shakira and Quevedo.
It also introduced much of the world to Peluso's theatrical alter-ego, the exasperated woman ready to vent her anger and frustration in no uncertain terms (the same archetype triumphantly reappears in the operatic video for “Aprender a Amar.”)
“Sometimes I contemplate this character from the outside and I'm surprised that it lives inside me,” he laughs. “Whenever I delve into my artistic process, this histrionic character appears with her frozen fury ready to explode. There's no rehearsal or anything like that. I mean, we recorded “Aprender a Amar” in just one take. It's a button that some unknown force pushes inside my brain every time I play.”
Now that she's ready to tour back GreasePeluso feels justified in trusting her intuition, the natural ebb and flow of her creative process.
“I'm a faithful person – I believe in faith – and I know what my function is in this world,” he says. “I could have accelerated my success and achieved greater material things if I had made concessions, but then I would have learned less in the process. In the end I chose to go my own way and I'm so glad I did.”
from our partners at https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-latin/nathy-peluso-grasa-interview-fito-paez-1235028746/
