Talking Santiago club nights, anti-government protest, and representation with the LatAm star…’DIVA’ from Javiera Mena’s new EP, ‘1 Entusiasmo’, is a frantic journey of a song. It starts with a throbbing post-disco beat, layered with husky vocals. A few bars of piano chime in before wafting synths add to the tension, inducing a ravenous anticipation for climax. A rapid-verse break teases you until finally exploding into a chorus of electro ecstasy.
It’s a disorientating, satisfying ride. “’Diva’ is all fire,” says Mena, explaining that the EP channels the atmosphere of a charged, restless period in her homeland Chile, when the country was seized by nationwide anti-government protests for months during 2019-2020.
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The track’s schizophrenic tempo mirrors the volatility of the time – ‘Diva’ was written about the Santiago club nights, when the air outside was thick with smoke from smouldering barricades and saturated with the stench of tear gas.
Thousands of protesters ended their day in clubs, where they unloaded mixed emotions of fury against the state’s brutality and the desperate hope of change onto the city’s dancefloors.
“That song has this crazy energy that we all felt during the uprising. Everything exploded, everything was shattered, and we just had to keep going forward,” she says.
While ‘Diva’ most succinctly epitomises this, Mena explains that the whole of ‘1 Entusiasmo’ was inspired by the emotion of the time.
“It’s a feeling of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm can be applied to falling in love, graffiting the street, wanting to make your country better, or going to a club.”
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Mena lives between Chile and Spain. She deftly ties influences from both countries in her sound, from collaborating with Chile’s rising trap artists, to producing her last album – 2018’s ‘Espejo’ – with El Guincho, the tropicalia Canary Island artist and mastermind of 2019 Rosalía and J. Balvin megahit ‘Con Altura’.
Her four previous records have cemented her status as an electro-pop darling of Latin America and an icon in the region’s queer scenes. Her music videos incorporate gay aesthetics born from her desire to make lesbian iconography visible, laid on thick in the music video for ‘Corazon Astral’, 1 Entusiasmo’s second single (think: papayas, the moon, water, astrology – if you get, you get it).
For Mena, it’s important to keep her sexuality present and explicit, and she feels a responsibility to do so.
“Because there’s still not enough (visibility). There is a lot of gay (men) pop iconography, but for lesbians, there’s very little.”
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The five-track EP breaks for reflection in pop ballad ‘Dos’, which she describes as a “post-romantic” song that talks about loving two people at once.
“The ballads of the 80s-90s that I grew up listening to sound beautiful, but (the lyrics) are often unhealthy,” she says. With ‘Dos’, she was careful to examine how she wrote about love. “It is about genuine, authentic confusion, it’s not sung from a guilt perspective typical of past romantic songs.”
‘1 Entusiasmo’ is an EP of defiance. From the energy of protest or confronting romance tropes, Mena sets her own pace and charges ahead. A second five-track EP is set for release next year and both EPs will form part of an album release in 2022.
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‘1 Entusiasmo’ EP is out now.
Words: Charis McGowan
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