Karen y Los Remedios - Bestiaria Karen y Los Remedios

On Ana Karen G. Barajas’s audio messages you can hear birds singing, a baby breathing. She talks about her music from her home on a Hong Kong island, eight hours ahead of Greenwich. She breaks with the tranquility and reality around her to announce the release of Bestiaria, the new offering from Karen y los Remedios. Ana Karen had to go through a tidal wave of events to finally produce the successor to 2023’s Silencio, surviving a bout of Covid, giving birth to a son and writing a PhD. The women of Bestiaria all emerge from these experiences: these goddesses and creatures from different cultures and legends embody the songs on this album, unapologetically reclaiming all things feminine in this world, asking no one’s permission.

Fronted by Ana Karen—with Z.A.M.P.A. (Guillermo Berbeyer) on guitars and Mexico City producer Jiony (Jonathan Muriel)—Karen y los Remedios have found fertile ground for their unique sound in the musical landscape of the Americas. Their new album re-treads the trail they blazed on Silencio, cumbia rebajada with a sheen of trip-hop and dreamy pop, all rooted in Ana Karen’s ethereal vocals. The music that inspires this Mexican three-piece has always been part of their lives, growing up in the barrio. Now, unleashed on the world, they can unravel the loose threads of the sounds they were raised with. The new record is steeped in a similar Latino vibe to Silencio. The same signature style is here, but there are also songs that verge on ballads, along with traditional cumbia and powerful cumbiatón and 420 styles. 12 Figures, 12 Songs The twelve tracks of Bestiaria are dealt out like a tarot card reading: creatures, symbols and tales that resonate differently depending on the listener. Karen y Los Remedios create a universe in which the stories in the songs drift between magic, desire and nurture— and perhaps even death. Ana Karen’s lyrics drip with ambiguity, sometimes coming through like love poems, other times holding up a mirror. “Mayahuel”, one of the downtempo cumbias on the album, tells the story of the Mexican goddess of agave and fertility. With magical, sensual images, the song invokes a spirit who died and fell from the sky, to be reborn as the humble plant that gives us mezcal.

Opening track “Curandera” paves the way for the rest of the album’s spellbinding journey, Ana Karen’s spectral vocals merging with horror synth, the beat dragging us on to the dancefloor. Lost in the rhythm, Ana Karen journeys through landscapes of desire and lust in more introspective songs like “Ninfa” or the majestic cover of Tropa Vallenata’s “Satanás”.