ANGÉLICA GARCIA

"She is a true creative, someone who has absorbed pop’s rules only to break them, time and time again."

In 2020, the singer, songwriter, and pop auteur Angélica Garcia was sitting before an altar that she constructed in her bedroom, as part of the process of her vibrant, prismatic third album, Gemelo. The altar was the culmination of Garcia’s new inquiry into ancestral veneration: looking into the past to inform the present with familial knowledge, helping distinguish her intuition from her conditioning. As a 29-year-old woman raised by an Episcopal priest father in a traditional Latino family structure, she had devoted her recent years to a process of monumental deconstruction of religion, spirit, heritage, and womanhood, confronting grief and healing. 

On Gemelo, Garcia holds space for this inviting mix of both serious inquiry and buoyancy of spirit, with the expansiveness of its vanguard electronic pop explorations mirroring the depth of its spiritual excavations.

Now living in New York, Garcia was born in El Monte, California to a family with deep musical roots. Her great grandfather was a mariachi director and trumpeter in Mexico, her mother was briefly a pop singer, and her stepfather was formerly a music manager before becoming a priest. Raised primarily by her traditional grandparents, Garcia attended the L.A. County High School for the Arts as a vocalist, studying classical and jazz; when other students asked her to sing in their band, which would eventually share bills with fellow classmate Phoebe Bridgers, Garcia had to navigate her homelife by sneaking out to play house shows. With growth and exploration like wind behind her, Garcia arrives at her clearest and most fully-realized vision of self on Gemelo. “I feel like I connected to something that I didn’t know that I lost, and that, maybe even ancestrally, my family didn’t know it lost,” Garcia says. “It’s impossible to feel at peace when you don’t understand what you lost, whether it’s battles that happened before me that I inherited, or issues in my present life. But Gemelofelt like clearing a fog. It felt like soul returning to body.”