Girl Ultra: RRRomeo, a lover she can take off

RRRomeo opens with a track called "¡El groove de Romeo!" and ends it thirty-eight seconds later. The groove is the engine and the joke. The man is the excuse. Girl Ultra's third album, and her first for Big Dada, is eight songs about lovers who are costumes: put on, described in detail, taken off.

Mariana de Miguel has been building this character since she was a teenager in Mexico City. Born in 1996, she signed to the Mexican label Finesse Records in 2016 and released two EPs inside three years: Boys in 2017, which carried a Spanish-language pass at Daniel Caesar's "Get You", and Adiós in 2018. Nuevos aires followed in 2019, the same year as "Damelove", her bilingual track with Cuco. By 2022 she was treating her own history as raw material, on El sur and on "Punk", the Little Jesus collaboration that samples Gwen Stefani's "Bubble Pop Electric". RRRomeo arrives four years after El sur and claims an authorship the earlier records only hinted at.

It is out now, with the download in 24-bit/44.1kHz and a translucent magenta 140g LP in a matte gatefold, download code inside, shipping on or around October 23. Four guests turn up across the eight tracks: Buscabulla, Chromeo twice, Jean Tonique, Empress Of. The subject is romance as rebellion, and the cast is half real, half invented: people who were in her life, and people she made up to stand in it.

From there the eight songs stay in motion, in the funk company Chromeo and Jean Tonique keep and the stranger pull Buscabulla adds. The lyrics do the real work. Everyone here is close up and physical: mouths, leather, makeup, sweat, bare feet, car keys.

"Te Caigo" sets the terms: sleepless nights, a new moon, someone imagined in detail, stones thrown at a balcony, and a request to call that is as much as the song will admit to wanting. "Mentirasmentiras" hands the same problem to Buscabulla and pushes it further, a song about losing control and being killed by a word, where the lies are unforgettable, ruinous and pleasurable in the same breath. Then the title track gives Romeo his inventory: leather pants, a purr, the salt of a mouth, a fantasy on television, a secret kept. As a character sketch it is the sharpest writing here.

"Denisse" is the turn. It leaves the bedroom for a woman who was a slave to a young love, took the car keys and drove to Mexico without saying goodbye, and is now happy and barefoot, listening to Mecano and forgetting. Girl Ultra gives her the whole song and no moral. "Ironía" follows with Chromeo, the longest and most crowded thing on the record, getting dressed to look good and then undressing again: makeup, sweat, fatal love, a bed that is not yours.

The last two tracks give away what the record is for. "Ramera" tells Paola she is not coming back, wants to be outside and seen, and walks over somebody to reach the door. "Tomás" closes with Chromeo and Empress Of and a man who takes what he wants, drinks, does not stay, and leaves; she is not asking for a repeat, only to be remembered when he sees other brown-eyed loves. Nobody in these songs is punished for wanting. They are logged.

The record is for the El sur crowd and for anyone who keeps Spanish-language pop with a low center of gravity on repeat. It is also for people who can laugh at the man in the song while it is still playing. It is short, too: eight tracks, four of them carrying guests who take whole songs. "Ironía" is the longest cut, and "Tomás" leans on two borrowed voices for the record's last word. The solo turns are the ones with blood in them: "Te Caigo", "Denisse" and the title track. A record claiming this much authorship should not need this much company.

The writing is specific enough that the complaint stays small. 3.5. A groove record with a sharp eye and a guest list it does not quite need.

The tracklist

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