Music is a constantly evolving industry, transforming practically with each passing week. From artists to genres, lyrics, lengths and even skins, every minute detail changes before you know it. If a decade ago the electronic music of David Guetta and Avicii was at the forefront of trends, now options such as reggaetón or urban are.
One of the new emerging voices in this last style is the Barcelona-born Lia Kali, who has been the first guest of El Hormiguero this week. Together with Pablo Motos, he has been able to highlight several striking aspects of his life, among them his time as a teenager: a complicated time marked by a psychiatric admission, which he wanted to capture in a powerful song from the album Against All Prognostics: UCA.
Representing the acronym of the Adolescent Crisis Unit, it is “a complete hospitalization care unit, in the field of mental health, which includes different therapeutic resources that allow to attend to adolescents in a crisis situation when it is not possible to do so in the day hospital”, as detailed on its website by the Catalan Association of Hospital Education Professionals (ACPEAH).
However, Kali defined a very opposite experience in Sant Boi de Llobregat, in charge of what she defined as “poorly paid psychopaths”: “It was torment. That’s when I realized that I wanted to release a song. There I saw how they tortured people, they had them tied to a bed for a week. There are people who need to heal, give themselves a hug and are not allowed any physical contact or talk to anyone. The solution is not to medicate them until they don’t even know who they are.”
“They are tied regardless of their diagnosis. In Spain there is a big problem with what we do with people who bother us, which is putting them to sleep. It makes me ashamed and painful that there are people who go through these tortures that are prohibited in many parts of Europe,” she insisted during the interview. A fact that generated many opposing discourses on platforms such as X (Twitter), while the singer spoke about her young stage.
“It was complicated, really. It was dangerous. She was a hurt girl, with a lot of pain and a lot of anger. It’s what I transmit in my concerts. There are many people like this and she can’t stop because they hurt her a lot. I know where that pain comes from, but there’s no need to go in. Life is b****, but it has blessed me with the pain of having felt so small, so miserable, and of having reached the point of thinking certain things that others also think. and they do not verbalize,” he said.
