This Is How You Smile

In 2016’s *Private Energy*, Roberto Carlos Lange, a.k.a. Helado Negro, celebrated his identity while highlighting themes like racially targeted enforcement and gender fluidity. The Brooklyn-based singer-producer’s follow-up, *This Is How You Smile*, allows him to wind down and find his center. *Smile* is by turns more self-reflective, a vivid reverie of personal memories bedded in delicate acoustic strums and atmospheric dreamscapes. Lange\'s articulate, compassionate voice softens the album\'s dense arrangements (which are interspersed with field recordings and ambient interludes). On “País Nublado,” a balmy bossa nova groove ambles against Lange’s pithy haikus. Serene piano strokes lead the way over his soulful, whispered baritone on both “Running” and “Please Won’t Please.” “Seen My Aura” is more effervescent by comparison, but just as chill—a lysergic funk jam where Lange’s naturalistobservations take flight.

Helado Negro returns with This Is How You Smile, an album that freely flickers between clarity and obscurity, past and present geographies, bright and unhurried seasons. Miami-born, New York-based artist Roberto Carlos Lange embraces a personal and universal exploration of aura – seen, felt, emitted – on his sixth album and second for RVNG Intl.

Roberto Carlos Lange’s sixth and best album as Helado Negro deepens and expands upon the imagistic nature of Lange’s lyrics and cosmic synth-folk. It is a sublime, masterful piece of music.

Considering how Private Energy positively beamed thanks to radiant songs like "It's My Brown Skin" and "Young, Latin and Proud," the title of Helado Negro's sixth album could come as a surprise.

This is How You Smile, the sixth full-length from Roberto Carlos Lange (aka Helado Negro), is a memory of an album — hazy, breezy and slight...

The title for Helado Negro's spectral and triumphant seventh studio album--This Is How You Smile--derives from a Jamaica Kincaid story titled "Girl" that is narrated from the perspective of a mother giving her daughter advice on how to survive in the worl

Helado Negro continues to flaunt his heritage on ‘This Is How You Smile’ via a scattering of hispanic influences and an intimate reflection of his past.

Helado Negro – the artist born Roberto Carlos Lange in Florida – has made many past musical statements reflecting the violence and oppression...