Rosalía’s Motomami transformation is fully underway. The Spanish singer just announced her new album will be out on March 18 and, ahead of its release, she has dropped a new track called “Saoko.” The song smashes together distorted chords, jazz flourishes, and a sample from the famed reggaeton hit “Saoco” by the genre’s titans Wisin and Daddy Yankee.
The Valentin Petit-directed video shows Rosalía hanging out in a convenience store before going on a high-octane, adrenaline-fueled joy ride with an all-girl motorbike crew. They speed along the pitch-black night just before a cop car tries to catch up to them. Rosalía delivers her lyrics more and more urgently as the music progresses, and says they’re all about “celebrating that you are always yourself even though you are in constant transformation or even that you are you more than ever at the very moment you are changing.”
The singer explained in a statement that she came up with the beat while playing an upright piano at Electric Lady’s Studio B in New York. From there, she added classic reggaeton drums from a music library sent to her by the producer Mr. NaisGai, a go-to collaborator of Rauw Alejandro. Rosalía, who has teased the song on social media for several weeks, added that she wanted to use the “Saoco” sample because it was “the most direct homage I can make to classic reggaeton, a genre that I love and that has been a constant and great inspiration throughout the Motomami project.”
In November, Rosalía first previewed Motomami with the bachata ballad “La Fama,” featuring the Weeknd. In the highly stylized video, which includes a cameo from the actor Danny Trejo, the singers bemoan the dark side of fame. In a cover story for Rolling Stone en Español, she said that her new album marks “the most personal story I’ve told. In my head, Motomami makes sense as a concept, as a feminine figure building herself. So, that’s how it goes: It’s almost like a self-portrait, when an artist makes a self-portrait in the context of the modern world.”