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\n\tBefore the Puerto Rican duo Buscabulla made their new album Se Amaba As\u00ed<\/em>, they\u2019d gone through a whirlwind period of ups and downs. Back in 2020, they released their breakthrough LP Regresa<\/em>, a gorgeous rumination of life in their native Puerto Rico, where they moved in 2017 from New York. Regresa<\/em> was met with tons of critical acclaim and attention \u2014 and then the world shut down.<\/p>\n \n\tBuscabulla, made up of artistic and romantic partners Luis Alfredo Del Valle and Raquel Berrios<\/em>, who have been together for a decade, managed to do a lot during the pandemic, releasing stunning videos and visual concepts for Regresa<\/em>. But the fact that they couldn\u2019t go out and tour the record made their career progress really difficult. \u201cWe felt this lull of not being able to promote the album and we were hitting a weird point of, \u2018Damn, we have to make another project now,’\u201d Berrios explains. \u201cBut we hadn\u2019t seen any sort of substantial gains because it was the whole pandemic. Luis and I were feeling like, \u2018Are we going to have to do something else?\u2019 Things were so bleak.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cYou put so much work into a record and then it comes out in this the weirdest environment,\u201d Del Valle adds. \u201cAnd then, like, a year goes by and you\u2019re still kind of in your house. So it was like, \u2018I don\u2019t know, maybe we gotta try something else.’\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tHowever, in April 2021, right on Easter, they got an unexpected call: It was Bad Bunny. \u201cI always tell the story, like \u2018The Bunny called on Easter Sunday,’\u201d Berrios says with a laugh. \u201cWhat\u2019s wild is that he said, \u2018You know, all I did was listen to your record while I was like an isolation.’\u201d Bad Bunny shared that Regresa <\/em>had touched him deeply, and eventually, he asked the duo join him on a song called \u201cAndrea,\u201d from his record-breaking album Un Verano Sin Ti. <\/em>So much of the dreamy track, about a woman finding her own autonomy in Puerto Rico, gets its breeziness from Berrios\u2019 hushed vocals, and it struck a chord at a time when the island has grappled with femicides and violence against women. \u201cAndrea\u201d became an emotional favorite on Un Verano Sin Ti<\/em>, and it currently has 550 million streams on Spotify. The gates crashed open for Buscabulla.<\/p>\n \t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n \n\t\u201cAll of a sudden, this explosion came,\u201d Berrios recalls. \u201cWe got the opportunity to really play, and we played everywhere: We did a U.S. tour, we played in Colombia, we did a lot.\u201d Yet all of it \u2014 the rollercoaster highs and lows, the touring, the hectic boom-and-bust cycles of music \u2014 began tugging at the seams of their tight-knit partnership. \u201cI think that with a lot of the craziness that was happening, Luis and I were all also feeling it in our own relationship. I mean, we\u2019ve been doing this now for more than 10 years, our band and being in a relationship. And it was just a lot. It really took a toll on us, and we just decided to write about it.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWhat started pouring out became Se Amaba As\u00ed<\/em>, a profoundly personal portrait of their romance and their relationship as artists, partners, and parents. (They have an 11-year-old daughter together.) It\u2019s far more intense and intimate than any of Buscabulla\u2019s past work, while still remaining sonically adventurous and unexpected. \u201cIt\u2019s a record about us,\u201d Del Valle says. \u201cIt\u2019s a record about our struggles as people to stay together. And it\u2019s one of these things where you have all this anxiety because you\u2019re really putting yourself on the line in a very real way.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tBerrios was interested in looking at all the ways love and connection have morphed in today, with constant distractions and digital overload. \u201cWe live in a post-romantic era \u2014 I think it\u2019s the overflow of information and everything being so transparent that has sort of killed mystery and the danger of love and romance,\u201d she says. To really interrogate love today, the band went back in time to examine these concepts over the generations. \u201cIn our album, we really look at our own history, our parents, our culture, and the sort of conditioning of how romance works in Puerto Rico and in Latin America.\u201d That shaped a sonic tapestry that defies specific genres or time periods. Songs like \u201cMi Marido\u201d and the title track \u201cSe Amaba As\u00ed\u201d capture the high-drama and theatrics of past balladeers in Latin music history without ever feeling obvious. (Berrios shares that the over-the-top Eighties brother-sister duo Pimpinela was a major inspiration.) \u201cTe Fuiste,\u201d with its skittering electronic spirit, and \u201cEl Camino,\u201d the first single that stews and slowly builds, are refreshingly modern and hard to pin down.<\/p>\n \t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n \n\tAt one point, the band considered making Se Amaba As\u00ed <\/em>a two-sided LP, with six songs chronicling Del Valle\u2019s experiences and six songs detailing Berrios\u2019. Del Valle shied away from the idea a bit: \u201cI was like, \u2018I don\u2019t want to have a couple\u2019s argument on the record!\u201d he says with a laugh. The project ended up being much more of a seamless conversation, but still full of\u00a0moments of open-hearted vulnerability that focus on each perspective. On \u201cEl Empuje,\u201d for example, Del Valle moves into the forefront, stepping from his usual position as a producer and instrumentalist to take the mic. Through aching vocals, he sings about the push-and-pull in the relationship, describing acute pain: \u201cWith all your anger and all your wounds, You want to suffer and make me suffer.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n \n\tDel Valle admits it wasn\u2019t easy to put it all out there. \u201cI felt that hesitation, for sure, because at least on my end, I don\u2019t feel like I\u2019ve exposed myself in that way before,\u201d he explains. \u201cBut I admire artists who are honest, and I have to give credit to Raquel, because she was ballsy enough to say, \u2018Let\u2019s do this.\u2019\u201d Berrios remembers being floored by \u201cEl Empuje\u201d: \u201cIt\u2019s saying, \u2018This is hard. I can\u2019t take the push.\u2019 And I\u2019m here sort of witnessing what he\u2019s going through,\u201d she says. \u201cI love that song so much, and it stings, but at the same time, I\u2019m like, \u2018Man you wrote a really good song.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tUltimately, the process of so much honesty, exposure, and bloodletting in front of the world led to catharsis, even as Buscabulla navigates what\u2019s next for them. But what they hope is that Se Amaba As\u00ed <\/em><\/em>opens a conversation for people grappling with their own complex feelings and understandings of love and connection.\u00a0\u201cWhen I think about this record, at first, I was like, \u2018Why are you going to be so risky? And why do you want to talk about something so intimate?\u2019\u201d Berrios says. \u201cBut then I felt like, \u2018Maybe we can help people.\u2019 Maybe it\u2019s through our own experience that people can really see themselves. The focus of this record is really kind of healing \u2014 and I hope people really reflect on how they love.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Before the Puerto Rican duo Buscabulla made their new album Se Amaba As\u00ed, they\u2019d gone through a whirlwind period of ups and downs. Back in 2020, they released their breakthrough LP Regresa, a gorgeous rumination of life in their native Puerto Rico, where they moved in 2017 from New York. Regresa was met with tons<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9325,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[1458,1459,1455,1460,1457,1032,1456],"class_list":{"0":"post-9324","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-amaba","9":"tag-asi","10":"tag-buscabulla","11":"tag-interview","12":"tag-relationship","13":"tag-struggles","14":"tag-talks"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9324","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9324"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9324\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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