Post genre Rosalia and Aya create different future/now visions

Post genre and the resurrection of future music with Rosalía and Aya

Pop culture can be so many things – it can be a place of comfort and order with its many high decibel revolutions tidied up into neat alphabetical record collections. It can be new artists doing their version of an old music, or it can be cosy fireside talks on genre-bending moments from Bowie to the Sex Pistols. 

There is a place for everything and a soundtrack for every mood. The great canon though becomes a comfy cardigan and that’s fine, everyone likes a comfort zone to inhabit and a place of cosy memories with old hits and decades long love affairs with old musical flames.

But every now and then, don’t you just crave a shock of the new and something to both confuse and blow your mind? 

Two recent releases have done that. 

Both sound nothing like each other and both sound nothing like anything else but both represent a post-genre time of future nostalgia when all music is out there all at once in a fast moving online soundscape where a creative fluidity is the new norm.

Rosalía is from Spain and is another break in the dying Anglo-American pop culture axis and the American cultural tariff. Her earlier albums embraced the seductive passion and beauty of flamenco, combining it with the 21st century rhythms of hip hop and R n B, before this November when she pressed the detonate button and somehow crashed to the top of the charts worldwide with her astonishing fourth album ‘Lux’ that deals with the divine in a time of encroaching AI.

In a music scene of comfort zones, tech faking and career plans, ‘Lux’ is ostensibly a pop record but in reality it’s a fantastic, bonkers combination of operatic vocals sung in 14 languages with four movements. It’s a daredevil album that adds all this wild vision to a hip hop phrasing and of the moment production techniques and rhythms, whilst it sings of love and spirituality, whilst being inspired by the mystical writings of French philosopher Simone Weil….phew!

It’s a stunning, audacious yet accessible adventure of a record to get lost and immersed in and follows its own muse and dares to break on through (there is even a sample of Patti Smith singing that very phrase borrowed from Jim Morrison on the album). It’s a prog pop record that you can dance to or be seduced by mentally, physically and spiritually. It sounds like the future/now and is an adventure into a new unknown and, like all the best music, is an art pop that is popular as no matter how wild the imagination is, it takes the listener on the trip.

Meanwhile, in an almost opposite environment of Spanish skies and flamenco sunsets and sensual passion and back in the nocturnal interzone of hyper reality creative Manchester, Aya creates the same kind of post-genre rush of ideas and rhythms from the bedsit frontline with an equally startling shock of the new. 

The signature ‘Off To The ESSO’ track from this year’s Hexed album is a jangling twilight zone of all-nighter nerve-jangling clattering rhythm and off-kilter strangeness. It captures that derailing all-nighter munchies vibes and the different rhythms of living beyond the time zone. It’s challenging, and it’s off kilter but yet again it’s strangely seductive and a frontier pop/noise that perfectly captures the rhythms of the now building in its bass of dislocated techno, UK bass, noise and industrial and has that adrenaline rush off 1977 punk if it was made now with a sound of the now. 

Created in the hyperspeed of all nighter Manchester where Aya was living at the time before moving to London, it perfectly captures the nocturnal forever changes of both cities of clattering new builds, youthful energy, drug jangle, 24/7 lifestyle and strip light nocturnalia and the strange creative underworlds of psychic energy and chemical comedowns. It may not be chart smashing yet, but will either be a catalyst for a new future or crossover into the post-genre world of no rules.