As Latin pop continues to send shockwaves through the charts, young artists from the Spanish-speaking world are taking advantage of the renewed interest in their rich musical heritage. Over the past year, Bad Gyal has been perfecting her moody, heavily Auto-Tuned take on reggaeton; now, 25-year-old Rosalía, also from Catalonia, is winning fans by hauling the folk art of flamenco into the 21st century, fusing that tradition with the sounds of bleeding-edge electronica and nu-R&B.
Judging by her debut London show – a slick, storming set that pulses with aggressive self-assurance – Rosalía has no doubts about her brand of flamenco 2.0. The genre’s rapid-fire hand-claps underpin much of the rhythm and the musician frequently deploys the style’s typically haunting wail – a low, vibrato cry of primal despair that renders the language barrier largely redundant. Aesthetically, she nods to tradition with an excessively tasselled all-red outfit while her dancers play on the snappy poise of traditional flamenco dancing.
This formula – taking the traditions of an historic art and dusting them down for contemporary consumption – could seem a little trite if it wasn’t for the novel sonic fusion it services. Flamenco’s deeply humane components – the skin-on-skin percussion, the tortured howling – offset the glitchy, artificially fast rhythms, mosaic-like production and, on one track, car-engine samples.
Despite Rosalía’s extensive training in flamenco, the show never feels remotely weighed down by history. Instead it is able to accommodate everything from Beyoncé-style formation dancing to Justin Timberlake covers and vocal effects reminiscent of James Blake.
This evening’s set is bookended by Malamente, which, at 23m YouTube views, is Rosalía’s biggest success to date. Ricocheting effortlessly between genres and styles, it’s a track that doesn’t just hint at the future of flamenco, but what might be in store for the increasingly global sound of pop music itself.
