The Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s debut album is an ambitious, bilingual record that hops between influences, echoing the liminal state of a 26-year-old immigrant in America.
Andrea Silva used to sing at funerals. Something about that bittersweet spectacle—as both a celebration of life and a gathering of grief—has never quite left her music. But that was years ago, when Silva was still a child growing up in Bogotá, Colombia, long before she moved to Los Angeles to escape the slut-shaming she endured in high school. Now, she makes music under the alias Loyal Lobos. She’s traded funeral hymns for synth-pop arrangements. And she’s found a way to marry the tough blow of a life left behind with the freedom that starting over allows.
On Everlasting, this freedom isn’t wasted. Silva refuses to fit into the sometimes narrow mold of singer-songwriters in the U.S., where a handful of women dominate a scene Silva once called, aptly, “very American and very white.” She tinkered with their sparse folk-rock on her 2018 EP The Fall before abandoning the limits of that genre for something else entirely: an ambitious, bilingual record that hops between influences, echoing the liminal state that comes with being a 26-year-old immigrant in America. Everlasting slips into this uncertain space and manages to thrive not in spite of it, but because of it.
Doing so meant letting go of some of Americana’s starry-eyed trappings. Some can still be heard on the album’s first single, “Criminals,” which balances the sad nostalgia of a time before meeting your platonic half with the addictive promise of their newfound love. When Silva’s voice swarms to the heavens, singing, “I’d kill for you,” it invokes a teenaged lust to evade the world’s rules together, her fingerpicked riff scoring the getaway. But on the rest of Everlasting, it sounds like Silva’s done running away from reality. Nearly a year after the longing “Criminals” was released, she’s leaning into herself more and opting for fun as an antidote to trauma. It’s a new kind of safeguard, heard in the whimsy of the album’s percussive pop elements—a surprise that only begins to make sense upon hearing that Silva landed Shawn Mendes’ hitmaker, Teddy Geiger, as her executive producer.
Traces of Silva’s upbringing in Colombia often illuminate these playful moments. Grand telenovela soundtracks, the dreamy haze of the countryside, and the machista culture that drove her away in the first place are all hinted at in experiments in shoegaze and reggaeton-reminiscent rhythms. It takes frisky songs like “Si Te Portas Mal (Be Bad)” and the Auto-Tuned “Papel” to break up the haze of Silva’s double-tracked vocals—a sonic shift that also seems to give way to more pointed language in her mother tongue. On “Si Te Portas Mal (Be Bad),” Silva reminds the guys that she’s a “perra, pero el alma baby/Entera,” or a slut whose soul is whole. This makes the lawless, cinematic slant of 2019’s “Criminals” feel schmaltzy in comparison.
That isn’t to say that the simpler balladry on Everlasting is without substance. When Silva quips on the record’s title track, “The stars are now aligned/L.A. people seem to care/Never got to see them/City lights over shine outer space,” you get a sense of a place back home where people can actually see the stars instead of just imagining them.
Yet this nimble songwriting is sometimes obscured—and not only purposefully, like it is by the sizzling feedback on “Whatever It Is” or the taffeta reverb of “You Were Bored.” Silva’s words have a tendency to coast loosely into each other, blurring entire sentences into one breathless slip. Hers is nothing like the crisp deadpan we get from L.A.’s Phoebe Bridgers, who Silva often gets compared to. That difference isn’t without its redeeming qualities, however. There is something powerful in this remnant of where she came from—an insular delivery in which the Spanish-language lilt of her motherland always makes itself known.
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