As a kid, Niko Rubio remembers spending countless days pretending she was a mermaid, relaxing on the sandy beaches of her native L.A. as music by Gwen Stefani, Julieta Venegas, and Nelly Furtado floated in the background. Sometimes, the sounds of the Limón y Sal accordion would be interrupted by the trumpets of the rancheras of Vicente Fernandez when her grandpa would pull up in his Dodge Ram pickup truck to take a slightly sunburnt Rubio home from the shore.
Rubio, the Mexican Salvadoran singer-songwriter who’s joined Omar Apollo and the Marías on tour, has always dreamt of fusing those alt-pop girl sensibilities with the Latin music that surrounded her childhood. Over the last two years, paired with Latin production mastermind Lester Méndez, she’s been crafting an EP that encapsulates those summer days of her childhood. On Friday, Rubio released “Besito,” the first taste of her third EP Mar y Tierra, out Sept. 20.
“I just wanted to showcase all sides of me, but specifically, I wanted it to feel like the beach. I’m a mermaid. I’m a Pisces,” she tells Rolling Stone over Zoom, showing off a seashell and fish necklace around her neck. “I wanted the EP centered as a thank you letter to my family, to my childhood self, and that inner part of me that needed healing.”
“Besito” opens with the sound of ranchera horns and seagulls chirping before a Nineties drumbeat takes over alongside Rubio’s sugary vocals. In the lyrics, Rubio reflects on “being a complicated girlfriend and trying to be cheeky about it” by hoping that a besito, or little kiss, will make everything better. The lyrics for the song, and for much of the EP, were born from Rubio’s own journal entries. In the case of “Besito,” they came from her entries about her most recent breakup. “Every song came from a dream, a story, a random word,” she says, fingering pages of her journal. “I hadn’t really written that way before.”
Executive-produced by Méndez, the production mastermind behind Shakira’s Fijación Oral, Vol. 1, the EP Mar y Tierra hears Rubio sing completely in Spanish, marrying modern pop sounds with the influence of Mexican music — mariachi, boleros, rancheras, rock en español. Meeting Mendez was eye-opening for Rubio, who had opted for English-language alt-rock on past projects like Wish You Were Here. “It was the first time I’d worked with someone that was like, ‘I get what you’re talking about, and I think we can get there,’” Rubio says of Mendez. “‘It’s going to be hard, because there’s a lot of moving pieces in your brain, but we can do it.’”
Mendez introduced Rubio to a new style of making music, where every note is recorded to perfection. “I don’t [usually] go back into the studio and re-record vocals 10 times. That never happens,” Rubio says. “It was like, ‘We’re going to make demos, and we’re going to dissect them until the end of it, to get every single portion correct.’ It’s crazy.”
Mendez describes working through Rubio’s musical madness as “a great deal of fun.” “She has a wide range of influences that filter through her unique sensibilities, creating carefully finessed pieces of Latin pop music. Her writing and singing skills are singular,” he says. “Together, we are having a great deal of fun combining different sounds and styles into something that feels very special…This is only the beginning of her creative journey, which has no bounds.”
Pia Riverola*
On “La Sirena,” on which she duets with Cuco, Rubio seems to bring Consuelo Velázquez’s “Bésame Mucho” to the 21st century, as she sings from the perspective of a “mermaid who eats men.” “She lures men in with her sexy, sexy siren song. And maybe she eats them,” Rubio says with a laugh. “Who knows what she does. She’s a wild girl.”
On another track, “30 Mil Pies,” Rubio gets into gritty detail about a sex dream she had during a flight from London, where she fantasized about joining the mile-high club with a handsome passenger on a plane. “I woke up and was like, ‘What just happened?’” she says of her favorite track on the album. “You know how all the old Vicente Fernandez songs are about cheating and being crazy? That’s what I wanted on this song.”
Even while making the EP, Rubio also continued to stretch her songwriting muscles (“I’m a songwriter at heart,” she admits), as she co-penned “Purple Irises” for one of her idols, Gwen Stefani. (The two projects weren’t totally walled off from each other, either — there’s a touch of No Doubt ska on one of the EP’s “Feliz Por Conocerte.”)
Rubio says Stefani was “a godsend.” “She met me when I had just started writing this project, and I was like, ‘I want to do this all in Spanish, but it’s going to be much harder,’” Rubio says. “And she was like, ‘You got it! You’re good.’ She gave me great advice on being yourself and knowing that I could trust myself and what I was doing.”
Fueled by Stefani’s confidence boost and tweaks from her Spanish-language songwriting right-hand Maria Vertiz, Rubio ultimately created the record she always wanted to, but never knew how to make.
“There’s a lot of odes to Latin music on the EP, and I’m not even going to sit here and say that it’s a mariachi album or a ranchera album,” she says. “It’s not. It’s referential. It’s pop with odes to my culture. And we wanted to do it in a tasteful and respectful way.”
“I’m really happy that I committed to doing it,” she adds. “There’s a beautiful influx of young Latin artists that are on the same wave as me, that are just finding themselves creatively, and doing new shit. It’s so cool to be a part of it. No one’s putting themselves in a box.”