One of Argentina’s most influential and exciting acts in the current music landscape, Usted Señalemelo has perfected a ludic and unprejudiced approach to genres and the traditions they grew up admiring, a mastery of melodies carefully combined with profound yet approachable lyrics, achieving a trademark sound that is entirely their own and has earned them an ever-growing fanbase in their home country and increasingly far beyond.
TRIPOLAR (2023), the trio’s third album, crystallizes their concept, taking their exploration to newly found heights. This comes as no surprise: the album took many years in the making, allowing the time for different creative stages that found multi-instrumentalists Juan Saieg, Gabriel Orozco, and Lucca Beguerie Petrich working together as always, then alone from their isolations during the pandemic, and starting where they had left off wholly transformed after the restrictions loosened up. The moods that TRIPOLAR manages to reflect originate from this long process and the many emotions and changes it brought, showing the tension between three clashing energies or “poles” as the album title hints at. On the one hand, a luminous, lively, and fun side, coexisting with a darker, introspective, and nostalgic one; on the other, with a sort of third humoristic energy in between that makes those tensions palatable and invites us to discover the beauty in the complexity of our existence.
Usted Señalemelo invited stellar producers Rafa Arcaute (Luis Alberto Spinetta, Illya Kuryaki & The Valderramas, Calle 13, Andrés Calamaro, Nathy Peluso) and Nico Cotton (WOS, Conociendo Rusia, Cazzu, María Becerra) onboard for the final stage of work on TRIPOLAR, which led to an enriching process as these masterminds helped them to wrap up each song and the album as a whole. They are also in great company when it comes to invited musicians: Usted Señalemelo pays homage to some of Argentina’s best in many ways, but in TRIPOLAR they directly invited musical legends Gustavo Santaolalla, Guillermo Vadalá, and Claudio Cardone to play with them.
Ever since Usted Señalemelo stormed into Argentina’s music scene in 2015 with their self-titled debut album, composed when the band members were only 19 years old, the effect was an immediate breath of fresh air that the group has lived up to to this date. Their guitar and lyric-focused hits were a sneak peek into the band’s vision, further developed in II, launched in 2017, with which they were deemed “the new young band leading the last great renovation in the argentine rock scene” by Rolling Stone magazine.
Now that they have reemerged triumphantly after the creative process behind TRIPOLAR, the wait was definitely worth it. Their new era –marked by the single “Nuevo Comienzo” which translates literally to “new beginning”– finds all eyes on them as the band navigates a creative peak, touring all over Argentina and Latin America and expanding their reach to new audiences worldwide, while always maintaining the essence of being a tight group of friends from their teenage years.
