Saramalacara’s songs are in themselves a web surfing in the early 2000s. In Heraldry, the long-awaited first album by the Argentine artist, we find explicit content, stories about making easy money, a video game and the effervescence of a potentially virulent advertisement that surprises in the middle of the screen to attract attention. The hypertextuality in his lyrics – you can find everything from references to Naruto characters to winks to The Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano – appears like the multiple open tabs of a search engine.
But That infinity of possibilities attributed to the Internet – so idealized at the beginning of the century – can also be overwhelming.: Ephemerality can generate a feeling of emptiness, over-information anxiety, and the possibility of falling into the darkest and most traumatizing experiences, for those who grew up in the free will of the internet like Sara Azul Froján, it was always just a click away.
The first sentence of Heraldry announces: “When I was happiest/When I had the fewest options.” Sara nostalgically remembers her past before she was known.. She finds contradictions between living the life she always dreamed of and not being able to sleep at night. The track is accompanied by sounds of church bells, and a kind of limited faith: “Even though I’m waiting, I believe/ That a line draws this.”
Religious references and existential questions are other strong points that run through the album.. Those questions for which Sara cannot find an answer on the internet, she directs to the figure of a God: “And if there is another life, is that answer going to scare me?/ And, God, do you hear me?/ Can you call me? “Call me, call me?”
In “.tumblr” announces: “I am faithful to my core / that is my martyr”, and He declares his “golden age” to be the one in which he could waste time on the corners of his neighborhood, going to the skatepark and trying new drugs.. Her current life is different, she has bigger responsibilities than keeping her mom from discovering the things she posts on her Tumblr account. She reflects: “Nothing fills me anymore and I go back / For a long time I’ve been living fast and I think little / I can’t decide if I’m an angel or a demon.”
In her debut LP, Sara manages to release a photograph of a time in which euphoria, a feeling of emptiness and a lack of faith intermingle. He does so by worshiping everything he truly believes in: his places of belonging – in the physical world: the Mataderos neighborhood; in the virtual: Otaku-digital culture, her values, her memories, her fantasies, and everything that constituted her as an artist in her 23 years of age.
When Saramalacara began to venture into this fusion of electropop, emo and hard techno that characterizes it today -with singles like “Water” in 2020 and USB Idolhis EP published in 2021 -, these genres were still little-explored terrain among the Argentine artists within his reach, vacant lands, like the ones he likes to use as a stage for his videos.
But Sara did not suffer the orphanhood of knowing that she was one of the few who were doing this style of music in Argentina.. She is the daughter of globalization and understands that the distances that separate it from the places where these genres are having a stronger weight may be relative. The two feats on the album are precisely with the Japanese virtual singer Hatsune Miku and the Spanish rapper Yung Beefartists from two countries where clubs are currently filled with young people eager to experience this musical eclecticism.
After several singles and two EPs worked together, Its producers Dayvar and Evar appear as essential components in the creation of this album that finishes decorating an increasingly consolidated sound identity. And that is remarkable in a young artist who shows that she is not afraid to bet on what she believes in.
Listen Heraldry by Saramalacara on streaming platforms (Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music).
