blush

“I feel my career as Girl Ultra has been something like a college education, and now I’m at the stage where I can allow myself to experiment more,” Mariana de Miguel tells Apple Music. Even during her younger years, the Mexico City native already oozed confidence. This creative self-awareness has always been based on her musical talent and her ability to be honest with herself. “Girl Ultra is a vehicle that allows me to channel many different genres—the many disparate influences that live inside my head.” Now the singer adds a new chapter to her story with *blush*, a seven-track EP that flirts openly with the avant-garde. Dance and garage converge organically with refined melodies and sequencers evoking the electronic anthems of the 2000s. “I love blending organic elements with digital programming—those contrasts can be either really cool or just terrible,” she says. The EP also portrays the emotional nostalgia of a young woman in her late twenties whose world exists in a permanent state of motion. Here, Girl Ultra walks us through a selection of her new songs. **“blu”** “It was the first track that I wrote for this project. It started with Sam Katz and Kidd from the band Noah Pino Palo and a need to make songs that sounded dynamic and carried a sense of momentum. I wanted the EP to feel like it was created in a singular space and time, and also write a melody that fell somewhere between sadness and happiness. I found this phrase on my notebook: *‘Te regalo el cenicero, quémalo todo, yo te espero.’* \[‘Here’s an ashtray, go ahead and burn everything, I will wait for you.’\] It refers to the desire that young people have to burn everything around them but then find a way to put things back together. It’s like, ‘I see how you destroy yourself and then you bounce back.’ This song talks about the feeling of being sad, but still needing to move forward and do what you have to do. I also like ‘blu’ because the sound reminds me of Moby’s *Play*—that specific way of programming the drums, combining them with organic elements.” **“blush”** “To me, melody signifies music in its raw state, before the lyrics set in. I like to sit down, get an idea going, and take it from there. Start with an empty canvas and build it up. I start recording fragments of things on my phone, and the melodies begin to emerge. I’m influenced by many different things, and ‘blush’ has some Arabic motifs in it. I love to delve into the cadence and the specific tonality behind each tune, using short words or words with more air in them. I see the voice as just another instrument, just like you connect an overdrive to a guitar. In the end, I’m the composer, but it’s also my voice—the sole vehicle for everything that I’m saying.” **“5to elemento”** “I was emo for a long time, and this is a little tribute to that, because the guitars have a Midwest sound to them. Sam Katz, the main producer on this project, played with many bands from that era—the screaming at the end is his. It felt natural to explore this blend, inspired by the emotronic years, when emo merged with sequencers. Sam started to record the guitar, and it sounded like the kind of song you would sing at a campfire, so I asked him to add some really aggressive drumming. It’s a sad song—that’s how we felt during the recording process, and the vibe definitely came through. I was just getting to know Sam, and we opened up as we recorded this song about being vulnerable.” **“bruce willisss”** “These are the songs that emerge on their own—they’re like a little piece of free candy. Sometimes the ideas that you trust the least end being a happy accident. This track stems from my love for the era of Röyksopp and Erlend Øye—they made club music that sounded immaculately clean. I thought it would be fun to use those same patterns but get them a little dirty. I also love the pop culture elements, like mentioning Bruce Willis or the film *The Fifth Element*. Those are memorable references, and I have an emotional link to them. I love those uptempo moods—sometimes I like to say less, but in other instances, I’m fine with spitting the words out and verbalizing a lot of things. This track allowed me to say a lot in a short span of time.” **“lalala”** “That’s Sam Katz on the drums. We wanted to recreate the opening moments from an anime—a band like Fantastic Plastic Machine—with those Japanese motifs. We also wanted it to be playful. It was more like an instrumental composition, so that we could connect it with ‘rimel,’ a fun clubby song with an acid house influence.” **“guapa”** “An ode to female empowerment, even though that perspective has become a bit trite. Here I’m saying something like, ‘Tonight I’m going out with my friends, because I look good and I know that I look good.’ I love dark wave and techno, and I wanted to make a somber song that never quite explodes—the tension will stay on until the very end. I like that it never quite resolves. You only get a breather at the very end, and it brings you back to the more organic elements of the EP, closer to Fantastic Plastic Machine, the Japanese sounds. I’m fascinated by the spectral moods of dance clubs and electronica of that time. ‘guapa’ espouses a darker mood, linked to female beauty, which I see as a bewitching kind of power. You know you’re good-looking, and you use it to your favor.”