I’ve been wanting to talk about Gabriel for a while now. The primary purpose of this post is to review his newest album Agüita, released quite recently on October 2 of this year, but I wanted to give some background to this review as well. I’ve been following him since I discovered him, like many, from Drake’s gratuitous sample in his track “Jungle” back in 2015. The track sampled, called “6 8” (likely from the time signature) has a real late night groove to it which I instantly enjoyed.

This introduced me to his debut album Bishouné: Alma del Huila, which is a solid offering of soulful, inspired tracks which I found supremely easy to vibe out to. It was easy to see he was underrated talent.

I enjoyed this 6 track EP and kept following him up to his sophomore release Jardín, within the same vein/genre as the previous album. This NPR Tiny Desk concert features a medley of several standout tracks from Jardín as well as “6 8” from his debut.

I was worried after a couple years that perhaps he had given up releasing music until I discovered he had signed with Jagjaguwar and announced a new album. I was excited to find his COLORS medley performance with three tracks from his upcoming album: “Someone”, “Agüita”, and “Bloom”, which was released on Spotify and the COLORS channel on Youtube.

It was clear the past several years entailed a marked evolution in both his music and his image. The medley included a reggaeton track spoken primarily in Spanish, which I had not encountered in past albums, and I noticed he was decorated with many, many more tattoos. His style was more conservative prior, but clearly evolved to him wearing… pants on his arms? Now, I absolutely consider myself to be open-minded, so I accepted the track “Agüita”, but found myself instantly enamored with “Bloom”, waiting for the album release to see if more tracks similar to that would be released.

Then came Oct 2, that fateful album release date for album three: Agüita. “Tombs” is currently one of my favorite tracks on the album, which is good, considering it is the first track! Unfortunately, I need more time to see if the reggaeton tracks such as “Muñeca” grow on me. Admittedly, I haven’t given them much of a chance, instead skipping to tracks I already know I like. “Blue Dot” is a standout track on the album.

I definitely understand that musicians evolve in more ways than one. Many musicians switch genres. I find it interesting that Gabriel decided to release a sort of experimental type of album including two different spoken languages like this, but perhaps this is his way of getting me (and other listeners) to open my mind up just a little bit more. I have listened to music from across the world, but have not really delved into reggaeton historically. Nonetheless, I will continue listening to Agüita. I thank Gabriel for years of great music, and look forward to what comes next.