Kali Uchis Had a Vision

The industry didn't want the bilingual artist to sing in Spanish, but she did it anyway.

- Tirhakah Love

FOR MORE THAN a decade, Kali Uchis has leaped across the Latin soul-music world in search of that elusive element of generational pop called “timeliness.” She grew up bopping between her hometown of Alexandria, Virginia, and her ancestral barrio in Pereira, Colombia, absorbing diasporic sounds: the bolero pining of trovadores like La Lupe, the supple harmonies of Cuban doo-woppers like Los Zafiros, and brash rap lightning bugs like Missy Elliott and N.E.R.D. At 17, Uchis was producing beats out of a hooptie instead of attending class. That, along with her Por Vida EP three years later, put her on the radar of Snoop Dogg and Tyler, the Creator (the latter collaborated with her on her first hit, “After the Storm,” from her debut album, 2018’s Isolation). The 29-year-old’s first Spanish-language album, 2020’s Sin Miedo, delivered her biggest hit yet, “telepatía,” a horny letter to a lover. It has reached over a billion Spotify streams, making Uchis the first female Latin artist to achieve that benchmark. Its success was clarifying. She grew more confident steering her career the way she envisions it as a bilingual artist, making a second album in Spanish, Orquídeas, out this month. It’s a path that has always come with some risk. “I learned early on,” she said, “that not fitting into one box is always going to make you more difficult for other people to sell.”

Did you know you were going to make another Spanish-language album?