Lido Pimienta

As much as an iconoclast, Lido Pimienta is a healer. The trailblazing GRAMMY-nominated multidisciplinary artist —with a practice spanning music, performance, and visual art— has been expanding sonically since 2010. She broke through on 2017’s La Papessa, an experiment in alternative electronica that beat out the likes of Leonard Cohen and Feist for the coveted Polaris Prize. Firmly recognized as the cream of the indie crop, the Barranquilla-born artist now based out of Toronto made her name with a sound rooted in ancestral reconnection by way of the Afro-Indigenous rhythms of her native Colombia, and a DIY punk mentality forged with the tools of electropop. With 2020’s Miss Colombia, she sharpened cumbia, electropop, dembow, and chamber music into a cohesive and profound reflection on identity, beauty, and the realities of life as a Caribbean woman with Wayuu roots. After her Miss Colombia tour was postponed, Pimienta dug deep into classical music. The result was Gregorian-chant inspired La Belleza, a decolonization of the European classical space born of her ballet composition Lux Aeterna, a historic collaboration with choreographer Andrea Miller that made Pimienta the first woman of color to compose for the New York City Ballet. But what lies on the other side of the aesthete exploring beauty? Enter Caribenya, her new album coming out July 17. Initially conceived as a B-Side to La Belleza, the record took on a life of its own, a full collection steeped in everything Pimienta has always been about: resistance, connection, and a desire to push sonic boundaries.