That definition of Bad Gyal as “Alba Farelo, Vilassar resident, daughter of the actor Eduard and dedicated trap and dancehall singer” that we wrote in 2017 has been decidedly incomplete regarding the current dimension of the Catalan singer and artist. The popular recognition of MTV serves to focus the personality and proposal of an artist who has been rooted in the circuit for some time.
From his Double Body management office, one with which Bad Gyal works, Borja Rosal says that “I wouldn’t say that this award is ‘it’s about time’, but rather that it is the result of a job well done and of growth due to its part for a long time. A deserved recognition to a very solid career, despite the fact that he is only 25 years old”. Indeed, Gyal-Farelo (Vilassar de Mar, 1997) started very young and at the age of 18 he already had his first success on platforms. She is currently one of the most recognized artists in the Spanish market according to Spotify, for example.
In addition, it is a career based mainly on singles and mixes (he hasn’t actually made an album yet) and characterized from minute one by music made freely and with a lot of vision and focus. And it is no coincidence that in 2019 he signed with the very powerful record labels Interscope and Universal Latin. And a projection that has been progressively shaped in the dimension of the calls and scenarios themselves.
In this sense, in recent times she has been remembered in her memorable concert at the Sónar festival in 2019 at the Sónar Village in prime time, or the previous year at Primavera Sound in a shared poster with a press conference included with Yung Beef and C. Tangana. And continuing to talk about the aforementioned Barcelona festival, this year’s event has few precedents: a double concert in the Barcelona edition, and one of the protagonists of its Latin American expansion. On February 11 of next year it will hold its first Palau Sant Jordi.
In this sense, Abel González, booking manager for Primavera Sound, believes that “Bad Gyal’s two performances at Primavera Sound Barcelona this year made one thing very clear: she was already an artist with an audience number and a type of of a show that called for a big stage. She had gone from a more soundsystem-oriented and, as it were, niche type of show, to being a pop artist who tended towards universality. And universal pop right now, to be of her time, so that it exudes contemporaneity, it has to be that showy on stage and it has to drink from music that a few years ago was more minority, such as dancehall, R
When Alba Farelo published her ep Warm up last year, the atmosphere was already agitated with the previous publication of hits like Zorra and Pussy. On that occasion, when commenting on her explicitness in some of her lyrics or her exhibitionism in videos and live shows, the Maresme singer was clear in her response to La Vanguardia: “There have always been people who tell you that you are too explicit, too sexy. , too foul-mouthed, too brazen, too ignorant, too dumb. But if you have the opportunity to say what you feel and think, why are you going to change and stop doing it because of what people say?
And when he told us this, we remembered what we wrote in these same pages four years earlier when he rocked it at Sónar for the first time: “He sang and recited his referential hook-up pennants, like Pai (his particular version of Rihanna’s Work) o Slowly (in which he asks “slowly, slowly, slowly, do it to me slowly, do it to me slowly, go all the way down”).
A career with its journey, with turning points that can be associated with specific songs, such as Fiebre alumbrada in 2016, Jacaranda a year later with a lot of international hook, and then Zorra , the remix with Rauw Alejandro, Blin blin, La prendo que la he started to play in Latin America, or Sin carnené, which is the last one he has done and which is like a continuation of La prendo. In any case, and in short, her lyrics and her attitude have a message of freedom about herself and some can be read in terms of female empowerment.
Also a musician, Borja Rosal, states that “rather than having a philosophical message behind it, so to speak, I think the code works very well: what makes it truly remarkable is its ability to write new codes, say things that no one has said before like that.”
Another artistic front closely linked to this growing visibility is that of the world of fashion. In this sense, Bad Gyal this year has had a very outstanding growth at the fashion level, being invited to the fashion weeks of New York, Milan and Paris, for top-level brands. And this aspect has undoubtedly had its importance for recognitions such as, precisely, the European MTV awards.
