If the Rihanna of Barbados can go six years (and the remaining ones) without releasing an album and not lose an ounce of social relevance, the Rihanna of Vilassar de Mar, that is, Alba Farelo, that is, Bad Gyal, he may also take his time to publish what is actually his first album. Paradoxes of the Spotify era: an artist can emerge, already made, from an artisanal YouTube – Pai, that version of Rihanna’s Work that Bad Gyal made in 2016 –, become organically and gradually famous based on well-placed hits and going through all the contemporary rites of fame, including the Estrella Damm announcement, without actually having an album to his name.
But the album is already here. It’s called La Joia, it has a cover like that of an R’n’B artist from the nineties/two thousand (the concept is from his main photographer, Sheila Janet), well-known songs, like that Chulo pt.2 with Tokischa and Young Miko , Real G, who sings with Quevedo or Mi lova, star collaborations such as that of the Brazilian Anitta, with whom Bota Niña sings and songs that the artist hopes will surprise even those who know her Instagram posts better than herself, such as what he has done with Ñengo.
Experienced in live performances, she will defend it on her most ambitious tour, the 24 Karats Tour, which starts on February 2 in Zaragoza and for which she has already sold out the entire Palau Sant Jordi. In Madrid, with one to go, he will do two nights in a row at WiZink.
Dressed in black, with her characteristic maxi hoops in her ears, very ironed blonde hair and lips that beg for a tutorial – no less than seven products there, we venture –, Farelo faces the promo day in Madrid with the professional posture that characterizes her. –as a teenager he already saw that this was a job and it was his job and he has not lost his way– but also a defensive point. “You’re asking me a somewhat slippery question,” she warns, when we bring up the topic of her recent refusal to twerk with Rauw Alejandro at a concert in Puerto Rico. “I’m going to do what I have to do, which is sing,” she told him then. The clip went viral and she was applauded for being determined and empowered. She then responded with a post in which she said, among other things: “I feel that the same media that today make ‘feminist’ complaints [the quotes are hers] are the ones that would have accused me of having something with him for hitting me too much.”
-Why did he speak out?
“Everyone was saying ‘she feels this way’, ‘she thinks this’. Well, don’t speak for me, I’m already speaking. I didn’t want to add more chicha to this matter because what’s the point, but in the end if everyone speaks for me, it’s better that I do it.” If she didn’t twerk that day with Rauw Alejandro, with whom she recorded a song and she has a good relationship, it’s because she knows her stuff. “Both me and him, everything we do becomes a hassle and it is tiring to live constantly surrounded by controversies. He twerked with a bunch of girls who came on stage and it was nothing personal, he wasn’t trying to hit on me.”
The other recent headline starring Farelo was much more shocking: Bad Gyal has quit the joints. Whose smoke, on the other hand, floats above all of La Joia. Has the woman who has written bars like “They call me Miss Marijuana because I smoke all the time / They ask me how I know how to roll with those nails” really quit? “I still smoke a little, but not like before. I have returned at specific times. And it hasn’t changed me that much either. What I am, my essence, will always be there. I’ve been crazy since I was born, without smoking. I had been smoking less for a long time, because of my pace and my lifestyle and all the things I have to accomplish in a day. In the end the important thing is not to have the addiction that I had before and that it does not condition me in certain things. Right now that’s not happening and I’m calm.”
When he talks about that rhythm of life and those commitments that must be fulfilled, it is impossible not to wonder if Farelo has not experienced what happened to so many artists before: those who sing the most to and about the party are sometimes those who can enjoy it the least. She, she says, still has time to lose her hair. “These Christmas holidays, since I delivered the album, I have taken the opportunity to reconnect with the club everywhere. In the Dominican Republic, in Miami, in Milan… I’m going out a lot and I feel like it’s not a waste of time for me. It gives me, I need to live these experiences to continue doing my thing.”
In fact, tomorrow Friday, after meeting with the press and the record company, all his friends will converge on Madrid and make a mess. She maintains a tight and fairly impenetrable circle. “I am very distrustful and it is difficult to reach me, to open me up. If you gain my trust, you can break it. But with my friends I am very cool and very natural. My parents tell me: ‘she meets new people’. I tell them: ‘I don’t want it, I want the usual ones.’ With the five friends I have, I’m perfect. They are people who never fail me. We talk, we send audios. That’s friendship, people you can count on. I know the five friends I have are 100% trustworthy. What’s more: meeting new people or having relationships… those things scare me more.”
The eldest Farelo publishes her album just eight days after her little sister, Irma, does, who makes music different from hers (“reggaeton with violins”) under the name Mushkaa, sometimes in the company of her twin, Greta, who also sings.
-What did they give them for breakfast?
“Well, a very complete breakfast,” he jokes. “It’s in our blood. It doesn’t even come from my father [actor Eduard Farelo]. It comes from my grandparents, but we also get the most shameless part from my mother [Eva Solé] and my maternal grandmother, 100%. It doesn’t surprise me to see the talent of my sisters. I am super proud and it makes me very happy to see how my sister is finding herself. At her age I didn’t have things so clear and the results are incredible.” She finds it funny to see herself in her videos from the beginning, when she gave off an overly hesitant and hesitant attitude that was impossible to fake. Those who discovered her then and explained her as a “neighborhood girl” and the greatest exponent of the ratchet aesthetic, that of the hiphoppas who mixed logos, tracksuits and gold, did not always know that she had grown up in a very solid house in the fourth municipality with the most per capita income of Catalonia. The fact is that this girl, the eldest of five siblings, took a liking to dancehall, the dirty cousin of reggae. The crush occurred in a shopping center. “I must have been about eight years old. I heard a Sean Paul song and I couldn’t stop raving about it to my parents until they bought the Trinity album for my birthday. After I was older on Spotify I saw that it came from Jamaica and I investigated. I experienced it as something very personal and very mine. Over the years, my friends have joined in.”
In another era, Farelo could have faced the classic demand for credentials – how much neighborhood do you have? – but that is not the climate in which he has operated. It is understood as something natural that one of the star collaborations of his album is with Morad, the rapper from La Florida, son of Moroccan migrants who spent part of his childhood in a juvenile center and perhaps the only person who equals Bad Gyal in production of headlines, although the rapper’s headlines often have to do with his bad relations with the police or the gestures he has towards the children of his neighborhood. Both are the two great phenomena of what is called, for lack of a better name, urban music, and they know it, although their stories could not be more different. “We had tried other topics, we had been talking for three years, but being two people who represent Barcelona and L’Hospitalet a lot, we wanted to have a topic,” explains Farelo. “As an artist, I find it incredible. I’ve seen him record and the bastard fills the entire track with a take, he doesn’t stop throwing out melodies.” The song they have done together is called Así soy and it goes like this: “When there is talent, only money comes.”
