The first time you hear one of Marina Herlop’s songs, it might sound almost incomprehensible. Much of her singing comes from a place beyond language; her piercing harmonies, switchbacking rhythms, and sudden modal pivots are just as disorienting. The Barcelona musician’s songs are equally inspired by 20th-century avant-garde composition and centuries-old folk music, but they appear mostly like alien galaxies modeled upon non-euclidean principles. After prolonged exposure, though, a funny thing happens: They come to feel not just familiar but entirely natural, imbued with all the seeming inevitability of pop music, as though each brain-twisting tone cluster were an expression of some universal law. Bewilderment has rarely sounded quite so catchy.
Herlop wrote her new album, Nekkuja, in the interim between recording her breakout, Pripyat, and its long-delayed 2022 release. She has been performing the songs in concert for two years—often enough that if you’ve seen her once or twice, and checked in regularly with her Instagram stories, you’ll have assimilated even their most labyrinthine twists and turns by now. The music is an extension of the jewel-toned art pop she began with Pripyat; the songs are similar in sound and feel, but they are also punchier, with sharper hooks and a feistier spirit. Though shorter than its predecessor by three minutes, the new album feels more ambitious and more daring.
Herlop delights in pulling out the tablecloth from beneath her carefully appointed songs, leaving cutlery and stemware quivering dangerously in place. “Busa” begins placidly enough: Mellotron-like flutes, spiderwebbed harp melodies, the clacking of a typewriter. A peal of elfin laughter from her friend (la Busa, for whom the song is named) ripples across the stereo field. But jagged tritone synths stab crosswise through the arrangement; stacked vocal harmonies (“Pollen! Pollen! Pollen!”) slice like an industrial laser. “Cosset” opens with the woozy chimes of a deranged Christmas carol, but it abruptly shifts in mood and intensity, as thrumming drum’n’bass rhythms and jazz-funk electric bass take over. Singing a one-word chorus in Catalan—“Worms, worms, worms”—Herlop’s multi-tracked voice soars while underneath, the rhythm section shudders like heavy machinery. Angel choirs and earth movers reach an uneasy détente.
“Nekkuja,” it turns out, is a made-up word. Herlop says that she came up with it after a long search for the precise configuration of syllables that might express the nexus of sounds, colors, and textures that she had in her head. Herlop has always been a master fabulist, but these songs reveal what a vivid lyricist and meticulous composer she has become. The album is loosely themed around the idea of gardening—a preoccupation she nurtured in those difficult years awaiting Pripyat’s release, when she felt her creativity withering on the vine, and she turned her thoughts to ideas of nurturing, custodianship, and the necessity of making peace with that which cannot be controlled.
She opens the record with a line—“Damunt de tu només les flors” (“Above you only the flowers”)—borrowed from Frederic Mompou, a Catalan composer beloved for his minimalist piano pieces, that she spins into a magic-realist poem about childbirth and history, with a chorus like an armored-up nursery rhyme. She touches upon complementary images as she goes: slivers of light in her hands; trees that are sick of humans; roots pushing to shatter the sky. Her byzantine world-building comes to a head on “Reina Mora,” where nervous wooden clicks and flickering handclaps are spun into a controlled rhythmic fury that makes me wonder what a Herlop/Jlin collaboration might sound like. A brief interlude connects “Reina Mora” to the album’s final track, “Babel,” an elastic fugue for what might be hammered dulcimer, striking a perilous balance between Arca and Arvo Pärt. Both songs share the same lyrics, and at the end of “Babel” she returns to the line that opened the album, repeated with one final twist: “Damunt de tu només les flors/Damunt de tu només l’esforç” (“Above you only the flowers/Above you only the effort”). Her voice is split, like light through a prism, into stark harmonic bands, and the album’s parable of sowing and reaping becomes clear; incomprehensible toil gives way to the ecstasy of creation. Worms, pollen, roses emerging from wombs: Rarely are the agonies of the creative process brought so enchantingly to life.
