There is always a timeless quality to Natalia Lafourcade’s music. On her newest album Cancionera, that timelessness becomes deliberate. It’s etched into every lyric, chord, and moment of stillness like new embroidery on old fabric. This isn’t just an album you listen to; it’s an immersive experience you are meant to enter like a small, candlelit room during a thunderstorm. Cancionera is a deeply theatrical and symbolic departure from the grounded earnestness that defined her last project De Todas las Flores. Where that album felt like a diary — vulnerable, rooted in grief, and rebirth — Cancionera feels more like a play. There's a new character that defines it: “La Cancionera,” Lafourcade’s alter ego, who acts as both a muse and mirror, guiding the listener through themes of love, heritage, and healing.
What’s most impressive is how this character doesn’t obscure Lafourcade’s voice, but instead it sharpens it. By crafting a fictional persona and alternative voice for this album, she somehow becomes even more honest. She lets Lafourcade explore aspects of herself that don’t always get center stage, such as rage, sensuality, absurdity, and defiance. The album’s storytelling is rich with metaphor and symbols like mirrors, rivers, ghosts, and lullabies, but it never feels out of reach. Instead, it invites living interpretation and re-interpretation, like a poem that changes meaning depending on when and where you read it. Natalia has always flirted with duality, but here, she dives in headfirst.
Sonically, the album is a layered tapestry of regional Mexican music, chamber folk, and impressionist pop. Tracks like “Cocos en la Playa” shimmer with vibrant warmth through its plucked strings, suggesting palm trees swaying just out of view. It’s lighthearted and earthy, but even in its breeziness, there's a wistfulness to this track. On the other side of the spectrum is “La Bruja - Versión Cancionera,” a spectral reinvention of a traditional folk song that pulses with quiet menace. Here, Lafourcade doesn’t just cover a classic, but instead inhabits it. This range can at times suggest thematic inconsistency compared to previous projects, but that may be by design here. Her voice slips between registers, echoing like wind, evoking centuries of women who’ve sung same melody, for protection, protest, or something in between.
The album’s production is meticulous but feels incredibly organic. It doesn’t feel overworked or over-arranged — just lovingly handled from its instrumental opening and closing tracks to songs that sound like they were sung in front of crowds. The use of live recordings, analog textures, and layered acoustic instruments gives the album an almost tactile quality. It sounds like a room to stand in, not a file to streaming. Collaborations with Hermanos Gutiérrez and El David Aguilar aren’t marquee moments on the project, they are woven into the fabric of the album like threads of a larger pattern. These guest appearances don’t detract from Lafourcade’s vision. Their voices arrive not as intrusions but as echoes, as if summoned by La Cancionera herself to help add color to the narrative.
Cancionera is more than just a record. It’s a ritual. It’s an invitation to step into a dreamscape where every song is a memory you forgot you had. It’s also a reminder that honoring tradition doesn’t have to mean staying still — sometimes it means dancing with the past, reimagining it, and encouraging it to say something fit for a new context. Lafourcade isn’t just preserving heritage here; she’s conversing with it, complicating it, and making it beautiful all over again. In a time when so much music feels like background noise, Cancionera not only demands to be heard intently and fully, but experienced with every part of you — especially the parts that leans into the romanticization and beauties of everyday life.
Favorite tracks: “Aperatura Cancionera,” “Cancionera,” Cocos en la Playa,” “Amor Clandestino,” “El Coconito,” “El Palomo y La Negra,” “Cariñito de Acapulco,”" “La Bruja - Versión Cancionera,” “Luna Creciente,” “Lágrimas Cancioneras”
SCORE: 9.2/10