If you take the grape and know that your album has managed to place itself at the top of the Best of the Year lists in Catalonia and Spain, if you look back while the bells are ringing and you can list awards and recognitions from most prestigious portals and magazines and general newspapers, means that your year has gone well. This is how satisfied Clara Viñals must have felt this 2023, who saw how La boca aigua (Primavera Labels), her fourth album, consolidated Renaldo
Viñals and company will be able to extend this end of the year that has left them in good spirits for a few weeks: they will present the successful album next Thursday at Sala Apolo, the third occasion for the Barcelona public after the concert in May at the Palau Robert —with the album just out of the oven— and the Cruïlla festival in July. They will close their autumn-winter tour next February 2 in Madrid, a fact that, even if it is not new, is always a remarkable event for any artist who expresses himself solely and exclusively in Catalan. In the western variant, to be more precise.
The satisfaction must be double because the singer and composer from Lleida already declared, during the promotion of the album, that La boca aigua was the work that best represents her in her way of understanding music. He also explained to La Vanguardia that, following the line of the previous one, L’amor fa calor, he built the nine songs – the album lasts a little more than 20 minutes – almost alone in a slow-burning process in front of the ‘computer, and that only in a last phase did he resort to the help of his colleague Hugo Alarcón, or of different producers such as Innercut, Joan Borràs or Hidrogenesse. Vinyals was clear that he wanted a continuous sound and this explains the notable presence of electronica and danceable rhythms, although this time with more variety: the touches of genres such as hip-hop, reggaeton, favela funk or favela stand out unclassifiable eighties video game sound from Encaix.
The rest of the formula is well-known: Viñals’ soft voice whispers some lyrics with hidden cat. At first glance they seem light and pleasant (and there are some, of course), but many hide darker feelings, always around the most universal theme in history: love.
“I have found my personality singing as I speak”, she pointed out herself in the summer. And it seems that this very personal naturalness that Viñals projects has managed to convince everyone in 2023.
