Sonamos presents: DOGA, Juana Molina’s eighth full-length album and her first album of new compositions in eight years.

A record that took almost six years to brew. It was like preparing a meal for six diners with ingredients for an army. The overwhelming amount of recordings paralyzed Juana to the point that, at one moment, she thought there was no way to make an album.

“Whenever I finish making an album there’s an inertia that makes me keep recording,” she says, but we can place the beginning of the composition and recording process for this new work in 2019, during the preparation for a series of concerts called “Improviset”, which Juana performed with keyboardist Odín Schwartz.

“The idea was to play as if I were at home, that is, to improvise,” Juana explains. “It was a duo mostly of analog synthesizers and sequencers. We recorded everything—so many hours—because there was no way to reproduce what we did; both rehearsals and shows were unique. Some of those ideas were later picked up again.”

When the world closed down because of the pandemic, Juana was finishing her set on the stage of the NRMAL Festival in Mexico City on March 6, 2020. That Mexican performance became her first live album: ANRMAL (RGS/Crammed, 2020), an excellent live document featuring a setlist based on Wed 21 (2013), Halo (2017) and the rework EP Forfun (2019).

The end of the pandemic brought developments in several directions: together with her producer and current manager Mario Agustín de Jesús González (aka Marito), Juana founded Sonamos label, which released, among other titles, magnificent anniversary reissues such as Musicasión 4 ½ (1971, the foundational candombe-beat álbum from Uruguay) and Molina’s Segundo (2000, a key record in the artist’s own discography). She also returned to performing in various formats (solo sets, “Improviset” with Odín Schwartz, or duo with drummer Diego López de Arcaute) across the United States, Europe and Asia, and severed contractual ties with the record companies that had previously released her work in different regions. In doing so, Juana became exclusively her own artist.

Meanwhile, the new material continued to pulse, and in spring 2022 she booked ten days at Sonorámica studio in Córdoba, Argentina. “We brought a preselection of the Improviset recordings, and there the ideas for new songs appeared more clearly,” she says.

Riding that Córdoba momentum, her home studio in the Buenos Aires suburbs became the refuge for long, sprawling sessions. By mid-2024 five songs were already sketched out and there remained an ocean of recordings to dive into and try to surface with an album. “After Sonorámica I spent two more years composing; I felt I had nothing. Until one day Marito started organizing what I had and we saw we’d reached 30 hours of ideas. That sparked enthusiasm but at the same time it paralyzed me having to decide which direction to take, because there were very dissimilar things. We even fantasized about making a triple album, one of them instrumental.”

At the beginning of 2024, Mario proposed finishing the work with an external producer, someone with fresh ears for the new material. In that context, Emilio Haro emerged, familiar to the team for his production on Carolo’s debut LP, released by Sonamos in 2023.

Emilio Haro joined the project in its final stage, but his imprint was perhaps decisive: “He got very excited from the start, and I could say he got more out of me than anyone before,” Juana concludes. “I would record a guitar and he’d tell me to record more—different sounds, different arrangements, different ideas. Then he would take the recordings and program things on his own; many of those elements ended up on the record. I like his overall sense of the songs, the aesthetic of the mixes. I’m more of a straightforward person; I don’t usually use post-recording effects, and I thought Emilio had great command for creating spaces around things.”

Comprised of 10 tracks spread across 4 sides of a double LP at 45 rpm, bearing its polysemous title, with extraordinary cover art by Alejandro Ros and proudly produced entirely by Sonamos, DOGA automatically takes its place in the unique territory of popular music that is Juana Molina’s records.

The album concentrates all the qualities that define Juana Molina’s music and goes a step further in the constant pursuit of the singular, where influences are hard to detect—genuinely original, literally unlike anything else. Unexpected melodies, ethereal, organic sounds, minimalist and subtle gestures, repetition as an aesthetic, austere, seemingly static harmony, lyrics as concentric layers: a familiar but always surprising landscape for the artist’s regular audience and an excellent doorway for newcomers to the world of Juana Molina.

Tracklist:

1. Uno es árbol
2. La paradoja
3. Desinhumano
4. Caravanas
5. Siestas ahí (LISTEN)
6. Indignan a un zorzál
7. Va rara
8. Miro todo
9. Intringulado
10. Rina Soi