The Singles Jukebox

Imagine what a day spa designed by Kali Uchis would be like…

[Video]
[7.36]

Leah Isobel: Pretty!
[7]

Ian Mathers: It’s not that often that I refer to a song like this as “pillowy,” but when I do it’s usually because I like it a lot.
[9]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Ethereal, effortless, enveloping: an embodiment of the qualities the song subject espouses. “Igual Que Un Ángel” is the first song I’ve been wowed by in 2024, and just a snippet from Kali Uchis’ masterful and diverse-sounding fifth album. 
[9]

Alfred Soto: Three weeks after living with Orquídeas, it came to me. The warmth of Kali Uchis’ voice (as she heats up the electric keyboards on the verse): a nod toward the Bee Gees and other exemplars of late ’70s pop. The rest of “Igual Que Un Ángel” works as a luxurious resting place from the album’s relentlessness.
[7]

Jacob Satter: Immersive and affirmative bubblebath disco from one of the modern era’s most successfully twinkly practitioners. I’m speaking of Uchis of course; Pluma is here all but in name only.
[7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: An underutilized Peso Pluma I can forgive, but it is cruel to hear Kali Uchis’ fluttering, wordless melody (at the beginning, and then in two isolated moments later on) and realize the rest of the song is content with just vibing. Her most evocative moment is a bilingual one (“La favorite de Dios… and she knows”), but any good will is lost when she throws in the painfully cliché “heaven must have sent you down.” Every good thing gets thwarted here.
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: There are no English-language articles on Alejo Duran longer than a page. Shakira, one of the only crossover Colombian pop singers, learned English to cross the border between English and Spanish pop superstardom and has comfortably straddled both. Alejo Duran isn’t forgotten, though; he’s a need-to-know for Colombian fans. So is a lot of Shakira’s early work. Kali Uchis, however, is a Colombian pop star who has several long, well-written cover stories and has mostly sung in English. She has become a need-to-know for mostly American fans. “telepatía,” bilingual/bicultural in taste and delivery, is her biggest hit, and it’s produced by Tainy, a Puerto Rican producer better known for his reggaeton bangers than anything on his latest album, Data (which is also bilingual/bicultural, but he is not yet a beloved figure in Colombia). It doesn’t seem as of yet that she is as revered as Duran and Shakira are (emphasis on the “seem”), but repeating the trick with a bored Peso Pluma and the vocal production of Austin Jux Chandler, engineer of superior Adele song “When We Were Young,” won’t do that for her. It’s no “Pedazo de Acordeon.”
[5]

Harlan Talib Ockey: On previous singles like “telepatía”, Kali Uchis showed that she’s adept at directing the production with her vocals as it flexes under her melodies. Here, she sounds both feather-light and intensely charismatic, the bassline and synths flourishing with her. The one fault is that Peso Pluma is entirely unnecessary; he’s unrecognizable under the thick vocal processing, and out of his depth from his usual corridos.
[8]

Jessica Doyle: My first exposure to Peso Pluma left me thinking: “Interesting, but that voice was not for me, so scratchy my throat got dryer the more time I spent with Génesis.” And I don’t usually try again under such circumstances; I’m not sure why I did this time, I’m still shrugging off the charm of “Ella Baila Sola.” But I ended up watching his Sneaker Shopping episode, despite having no previous exposure to sneaker culture, and came away with: “Voice still not for me, but the man himself seems charmingly bashful.” Also, there was a morning of singing “rompe la dompe” to myself. So I tried again, with Spotify’s generic “This Is Peso Pluma” playlist. After the Anitta collab (catchy but bland) and the Becky G collab (stronger, largely due to Becky G), this song started, and before I’d even heard a voice: “Oh yeah, there’s a Kali Uchis collab!” Because really, we already knew Kali Uchis could do this sort of dreamy floaty disco in her sleep; he was always going to be the wild card. (The first dozen or so comments on YouTube, hilariously, are variations on, “I didn’t expect much from Peso Pluma here, I was pleasantly surprised!”) His sandpaper voice turns out to be perfect for “Igual Que Un Ángel.” If anything, he’s a little smoother than he needs to be, as if he erred on the side of fitting into her groove. The score below is thus 60% obligatory for dreamy floaty disco done right and 40% a reflection of my homegrown parasocial narrative that Peso Pluma is a sweetheart who approaches collaboration opportunities as a chance to learn from other artists and try something new, rather than as an obligation or a way to swing his newfound fame around. This approach may not hold up any better than “Ugh, scratchy voice” did. But it’s a lot more fun.
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: So lush and charming that even Peso Pluma sounds smooth here. When I listened to this for the first time, I felt genuinely bad for all of the anglosphere’s contributions to the disco revival moment of the 2020s, made irrelevant by Kali Uchis’ totalizing achievements in grooves. She’s always been a compelling performer, but as she’s developed as an artist her songs have grown into richer and richer texts. When she coos that the song’s subject is God’s favorite, it’s not just a passing bit of sacrilege but something deeper. She’s got this ability to convey devotion in a way that few artists are able to right now, an emotive skill that is as much nostalgic as it is novel.
[9]

Kayla Beardslee: Kali is the master of harnessing grooves that are just otherworldly enough: at the first touch of that sexy, sophisticated disco beat, you’ll be lifted out of your body to a higher (and simpler) plane, yet left with enough corporeal feeling to appreciate the delicate breeze and scent of roses that swirl around you, summoned by the dynamic dance of her voice smoothing away the creases in a swath of velvet.
[8]

Will Adams: Kali sings the praises of an angel from above, but she’s the one who sounds heaven sent. Swathed in reverb, her voice turns the relatively boilerplate disco backing into a hazy dream, where you dance in slo-mo as you breathe in the sweetest perfumes.
[7]

Dorian Sinclair: Both vocalists on “Igual Que Un Ángel” wisely stick to a very light delivery, skimming over the bells-and-synth soundscape. The whole thing would feel wispy and insubstantial if not for that bass groove holding everything down to earth, but instead, we get a frictionless glide through the song, effortless the way movement is in dreams. And if the song is like a dream, those final seconds when the bass drops out and we get that slightly off-kilter ascending line are like waking up, and realizing you slept so easily and effortlessly you’re not even sure how much time has passed.
[8]

Katherine St. Asaph: Sometimes this sort of soft-focus disco feels as if it could cast a spell forever. Sometimes the spell ends a minute before the song does. Doesn’t mean it isn’t nice.
[7]