Listen to Méxican Producer Smurphy's New Opus About Weird Love

Jessica Smurphy has gained recent renown for her work with México City’s NAAFI crew—some of the most interesting producers and DJs and dance nights going—but she’s been releasing outré, sometimes funny, and obstinately experimental dance tracks for a few years. (A personal fave: this track on Maligna’s excellent Negative Youth México compilation, where she pairs with ever-underrated producer Lao for a breakbeat rave-up that’s a weirdly sweet ode to her home country.) Following a recent move to Los Angeles, Smurphy will drop another full-length on LEAVING Records in May, called A Shapeless Pool Of Lovely Pale Colours Suspended In The Darkness—a reference to astrology and Peter Pan.

On “Missing2MyBB,” the first song from that album, she toys with the rhythm and conventions of the Méxcian genre 3ball
, letting its familiar roiling notes breathe in and out in tandem with her ghost vocals, before they all evaporate to make way for a more focused, footwork-influenced outro. If it sounds like palpitations, that’s on purpose. Says Smurphy:

“…the album is all about love. If I gotta tell a message to everyone, I wanna say that what you have to do in yr life is love what you are and what you do, and if you do things with love, you’ll be fine. This might sound extremely corny, but I don’t care. If you really listen to the album, you’ll notice crazy changes and hard beats, its not very mellow… love is not only pink ribbons and sugar, it is a living thing, it is sudden, it is insane.”

Smurphy and her compatriots are extremely creative and awesome, so it’s heartening to think she’ll potentially mine a larger audience in the States, whose non-Spanish-speaking audiences tend to marginalize Spanish-language music no matter how excellent it is. If you’re in México, catch Smurphy on tour this month with Nicolas Jaar at el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (April 23), 360e Venue in DF (April 24), or Pabellon A Calle 2 en Guadalajara (April 25). A Shapeless Pool Of Lovely Pale Colours Suspended In The Darkness drops May 12.