Windmills and Motorcycles
When most people think of Spanish music, they think of songs engineered to sound exotic enough for drunk tourists to swing their arms to on a package holiday. Rosalía is the correction to all of that—not one that argues with the tradition but one that goes so deep into it, through flamenco and oral history and the full weight of Andalusian folk music, that she comes out the other side into something entirely contemporary and entirely her own.
El Mal Querer broke through in 2018 with a combination of flamenco, R&B, and electronic production that shouldn’t cohere as well as it does. Malamente and Pienso En Tu Mirá dropped first that summer and the critical response was almost immediate—six Latin Grammy nominations, wins for Best Alternative Song and Best Urban Fusion Performance, year-end lists naming her best new artist, best album, best video. James Blake brought her onto his record. Coachella announced her. The momentum felt less like a breakout and more like the correction of a long overdue debt.
The video for De Aquí No Sales—the latest visual chapter of El Mal Querer—was directed by Diana Kunst and Mau Morgó and shot at the windmills of Alcázar de San Juan, the same windmills Don Quixote charged at. Whether that’s an intentional reference to tilting at impossible things or simply a great location, I’d rather leave open. The motorcycle iconography from Malamente returns, giving the whole visual project a consistency—this isn’t a playlist of videos but a world, with its own recurring symbols and internal logic. Rosalía inside that world is not performing Spain for outside consumption. She’s performing something far more specific and far more hers, which is exactly why it translates everywhere it lands.