Kali Uchis knows how to ease us into her albums, ensuring from the very first moments this one’s not going to be any less luxurious or pleasing than the last. Orquídeas, her latest Spanish–language effort, is no exception, but it also catches listeners by surprise. Much like ‘in my Garden…’ from last year’s lavish Red Moon in Venus, opener ‘¿Como Así?’ is graceful, pillowy, and inviting – “If you come around here/ You’ll never wanna leave,” she promises – before taking a turn, a dance beat suddenly pulsing the track forward. The Colombian American singer has said that while Red Moon in Venus was soulful and down-tempo, Orquídeas is her uptempo album, and those who enjoyed the early singles ‘Muñekita’, featuring Dominican rapper El Alfa and City Girls’ JT, and the Karol G collab ‘Labios Mordidos’, might have expected as much. But it’s not like Uchis just didn’t want to waste time between albums and made Orquídeas in rapid response to Red Moon in Venus, hoping to capitalize on its success and push her sound in a different direction. No – she made those albums at the same time, and this is her simply owning the versatility that made her stand apart in the first place. It deserves just as much praise as its predecessor.
According to Uchis, her first label didn’t give Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞, her previous Spanish-language LP, the proper promotional push. But after the success of ‘Telepatía’, which became her biggest hit yet, there will no doubt be more support behind Uchis’ multi-faceted approach. But Orquídeas, which is named after the national flower of Colombia, also happens to be an overall stronger album than Sin Miedo, bolder and more dynamic in its embrace of different styles. She seeks not just to combine genres but, in her words, “re-define the way we look at Latinas in music,” and her take on traditional Latin styles like bolero and dembow are not only refreshing but integrated as fluidly as the way she switches between English and Spanish – which sounds seamless yet also has a way of punctuating her lyrical shifts and nuances.
Take ‘Te Mata’, which might be the album’s centerpiece – Uchis rarely dwells on the past, but when she briefly touches on it here, bolero is the perfect fit for a moment of dramatic reclamation: “Nunca vas a poder cortar mis alas y eso es lo que te mata,” she sings (“You’ll never be able to cut my wings, and that’s what kills you”). As she flies back on to the ethereal territory of ‘Perdiste’, she looks to a former lover with cold, hard pity (“Did you cry seeing the bed empty?/ Did you fill it up with strangers, trying hard to replace me?”), yet the track is tinged with melancholy acceptance, mirrored by the buzzing rhythm that crashes against its soft, dreamy production. That’s not the space she occupies for most of the album, which is generally more assertive, and yes, upbeat than Red Moon in Venus. But for the most part, it wanders through the same lovelorn daze, which she gets to luxuriate on tracks like the mid-tempo groove of the Peso Pluma duet ‘Igual Que Un Ángel’ and the following ‘Pensamientos Intrusivos’, where intrusive thoughts of love take the form of gorgeous, fluttering harmonies. She can be tender and demanding in the same breath, but will brush aside anyone still skeptical of young – and especially this – love: “What do they know/ They’re miserable, broken, and alone.”
The fierce, thrilling, and downright frenzied energy of reggaeton tracks like ‘Muñekita’ and ‘Labios Mordidos’, then, is not quite representative of the whole album. But it’s part of what makes the record’s final stretch feel so vital and celebratory, largely thanks to the wild interplay between Uchis and her guests, who bring more than enough attitude to their performances to edge her out of her languid, blissful zone, like when Rauw Alejandro hops in on ‘No Hay Ley Parte 2’, a remix of the 2022 single. You can only set the tone for so long before you need to take things to the dance floor, and Orquídeas proves there’s no reason the elements of house and disco that are all over the album shouldn’t tug alongside the merengue rhythms that joyously bring it to a close. That’s because when Kali Uchis sings about love, she’s also singing about her own timeless vision: as she puts it on ‘Young, Rich & in Love’, “No one in the future or from yesterday/ Will be like me, and you know it.”
