Rita Indiana
"La Montra" is back! 'Mandinga Times' is Rita's first album in 10 years, and the anticipation is heavy as a mountain. Produced by Eduardo Cabra (of Cabra, Calle 13, & Trending Tropics fame), the album's featured guests include Mexican Rock icon Rubén Albarrán (Cafe Tacvba), Dominican rapper Kiko El Crazy and Puerto Rican singer-songwriter MIMA. 'Mandinga Times' is a mad fusion of sounds. Dominican Dembow meets Black Sabbath-like dark Metal, exploding with manic Merengue, traditional Gagá, electro-boogie, & the driving force of raw punk. Rising with the energy of the apocalypse, “Mandinga Times is an album about the end times,” Rita says. “I like to call it a songbook for the end of the world.”
For many who are familiar with Rita's legacy, it should come as no surprise that music is a parallel artistic career for Rita. After having decided to become a writer in her teens, she has produced six highly regarded novels (one of which, titled "Papi", is set to be released as a feature film), and three volumes of short stories. She began to dabble in music in the late 2000s, learning to construct beats and teach herself to make music. A decade ago, 'El Juidero,' put her on the map in a big way, establishing not only her unique fusion of traditional music of the Dominican Republic with rock and electronica, but her over-the-top stage show replete with gender-bending pyrotechnics. In 'Mandinga Times,' Rita Indiana has finally made an album that seems to stitch together so many of the parts of her aggressively manic yet gently sweet, healing artistic energy. When she closes it with “Claroscuro,” one of Cabra’s favorite tracks, she couples a kind of Bad Bunny lyricism with hybrid merengue-rock crescendos that allude to a sense of hope. “That song shows that although this album might be about the end of the world, the small tragedies and craziness, and the small marvels of life, the demons and angels that live inside us every day,” she reflected. “It’s not about Trump or Putin, it’s about us, our personal drama, and how we have to work on ourselves first to change all of this.”