Gabriel Garzón-Montano today presents new single, “Bloom,” from his forthcoming album, Agüita, out October 2nd on Jagjaguwar in association with Stones Throw. Bold, confident, and utterly multifaceted, Garzón-Montano explores three characters across Agüita’s 50-minute runtime: the debonair leading man, the Latin Urban hitmaker, and the wistful impressionist. With preceding singles “Someone” and the album’s title track, “Agüita,” we’ve heard from the first two, respectively. Today, with the release of “Bloom”, the complete picture at last comes into focus.
Comparing the growth and loss inherent in human life with the changing of the seasons and the life cycles of the universe, “Bloom” is “a song about birth, life, decay and death,” says Garzón-Montano. “I looked up the word Bloom and was delighted at the many definitions it boasts. Using the ones that lent themselves to my story I decided to start the first and last phrase in each stanza with the word. Each line uses the definition to describe a different state of human development of a stage of life.
Bloom beat into a simple tool
Opening without a clue
Blush to taste your sweet perfume
Bloom – all you ever do.”
Agüita, Gabriel Garzón-Montano’s first release for Jagjaguwar, follows 2017’s Jardín, the artist’s acclaimed debut full-length melding classical and folkloric instruments with R&B, hip-hop, and cumbia. A sequence of impossibly diverse offerings ranging from trap anthems to string-drenched art pop ballads, Agüita is a prismatic self-portrait, personal and universal all at once. Garzón-Montano’s ability to execute a wide range of musical styles is his secret weapon. Whether you’re here for the medium, or for the message, for the man himself, or one of his characters, Agüita stands as the strongest installment thus far in a series of alarmingly sincere, sensationally profound works, from an artist who has sought not only to challenge established preconceptions and categories, but to expose their ultimate unworthiness.
