AKRIILA, "epistolares"
An urbana wunderkind widens her scope and hits her mark
AKRIILA has had a big year. Last April, Rolling Stone called out the Chilean trap artist as one of the rappers soundtracking the country’s current political moment. AKRIILA took the opportunity to tease her next record that she claimed, would expand beyond her past offerings into reggaeton and drum & bass, which sounded pretty cool. The album she then released in August sounds even better. epistolares delivers on her promise and then some, welding all the influences she name-checked into a well-fused time capsule of some of the best ideas that the 2020s had to offer anywhere. Snippets of “worldw1de” sound like something A.G. cooked up before realizing it was too skronky for Brat. The unabashed maximalism of “NANAフリーク版” channels K-Pop at its most thrillingly absurd. AKRIILA expands on the D&B-meets-pop alchemy of Pink Pantheress with “superficial,” then collides it with plugg via Gianluca’s sad boi verse on “teoría del tempo.” And then, of course, there’s reggaeton, a phenomenon that’s now properly international, and which may soon welcome “epitafio” as one of the biggest bangers in its continent-hopping canon.
The album landed AKRIILA a spot on some of the more knowledgeable best-of and artist-to-watch lists. More broadly, it positions the 21-year-old at a more central intersection of Chilean music, providing a bridge between the dark eclecticism of Tomasa del Real’s neoperreo demi-movement and the Internet-fueled hyper-eclecticism that seems to be AKRIILA’s generation’s by birthright. It also comes five years into a constitutional crisis that has shaken Chilean society since 2019, when mass protests against living costs and income inequality spiraled into a period of political unrest now known simply as the estallido social. This backdrop, although in many ways extremely specific to Chilé, also feels somehow universal, turning AKRIILA’s epistolares into letters from the sharpest point of the knife’s edge that political systems seem to be teetering on everywhere. Twenty years ago, it might have seemed counterintuitive for the most globally conscious album of the year to have come from a reggaetonera. In 2024, I’m not sure it could have been made by anyone else.
Bonus Pick: For more all-caps chaos pop from the other other corner of the map, check out After Image by HYPER GAL.
