Amore Is Making the Absurdist Pop She Wants to See in the World

María Moreno Martínez was building prosthetic arms as part of her science degree when she realized she was destined for something else. It was 2020, and though she was on an engineering track at university, she had also received extensive classical piano training in Murcia, Spain, where she grew up. “Something switched in my mind,” she says, “and I knew that I had this urge inside of me.” On the piano, she began writing her first-ever original song, “La Arena,” a jazzy bit of neo-soul with nostalgic lyrics about the beach and unexpected harmonic layering. She had played in bands before—including with the Chilean songwriter Javiera Mena, with whom she now has a song—but this was her first attempt at expressing her own creativity. “I ended up here really organically, without any plans. I was just like, ‘OK, I’ve got this song, I’m gonna release it. I didn’t think about it more than that, because it wasn’t my life plan.”

“La Arena” was Moreno Martínez’s first release as Amore, and no disrespect to the engineering community, but I’m so happy her plan shifted. The singer, songwriter, and producer’s latest album, Top Hits, Ballads, Etc…, is a delectable collection of minimalist bedroom-pop music, with her slightly raspy soprano guiding woozy synth production and clicky percussion, the product of working alongside several musician friends in Madrid, where she now lives—including the producer Dinamarca, a frequent collaborator. Some of Top Hits’ romantic, longing tracks seem to reimagine millennial pop as percussive experiments, like “Delirio,” which sounds like Tasty-era Neptunes in a haunted house; others combine Cocteau Twins-inspired harmonies with underground electronic sensibilities, such as the ethereal “Querió” and “I Gotta Feeling.” 

It’s one of my favorite records so far this year, spacious and inventive in its dreaminess. And its accompanying videos are great, too—after realizing she wanted more time to make music, Moreno Martínez switched her major to cinema studies and journalism—with clips as ingeniously unfussy as her songs. I’m obsessed with the video for “Querió,” which showcases Amore and several dancers doing traditional Spanish choreography on Heelys—you know, those sneakers where the roller skate wheels pop out—in front of a “Hot Girl Music” banner.

Amore began writing Top Hits, Ballads, etc… two years ago, when she was 23, and had the idea to bring her songwriting friends together to conceptualize the songs that would become the album. Its cheeky title, she says, “justifies everything—I didn’t want the pressure of a concept album, otherwise you can’t make one. And it just sounded so absurd—I was self-conscious, like, I'm not that big, I'm not that old or that expert, so I need that freedom in order to release an album and be at peace with it.”

I ask her about one of my favorite songs, “Last María on Earth,” an acoustic, underwater-sounding ballad that imagines a post-apocalyptic landscape where she is the only person left. “As a singer, you're expected to write about yourself all the time, but the truth is, my life is not that interesting,” she laughs, “so I wanted to develop the fiction part of me, too.” Amore got together with a friend and began imagining what she might do if she were the only human; the answer was that “I would make my bed.” Ironically, though, the song began converging with her reality: “If I was lonely, maybe I wouldn't care about what people said, because nobody was talking,” she says, “so it ended up being about myself and my personal experience. But the starting point was fiction!” 

Amore and I speak in late May, when she has a break from rehearsals for the show she was creating for Barcelona’s Primavera Sound—a performance that includes Amore showing off her piano skills, sleepy dancers in opera gloves, and a friendly sign on the projector behind her that read, “HI! YOU ARE WATCHING AMORE.” Her visuals are rooted in her philosophy that “aesthetics and music are so connected, and images are so important to not make it so abstract,” she told me, and are made with her friends on an iPhone, “without using the traditional tools that make it be super cinematographic, mainstream or whatever. I’m fed up by the ‘emerging artist’ tag that people automatically give you just because you're using limited resources, right? I do it on purpose, and I'm trying to demonstrate through my project that you can do really solid and high-quality things without spending a lot of money. And I’m maybe challenging the traditional way of making music in my sound too. People think everything has to be so expensive and so official in order to be of high quality—that's what I'm trying to fight.”

The most recent clip on Amore’s YouTube page is labeled “AMORE LISTENING PARTY,” released alongside Top Hits, though it is nothing of the sort: rather than play the album front to back, it is simply a seven-minute clip of Moreno Martínez and several dancers doing choreo in a heavily fog-machined gym; they are wearing headphones, where presumably they are the ones listening to the album. Towards the end, the dancers join together in a circle, which morphs into a spinning CD, as if to amplify the sense of DIY absurdism therein, where she sings about wanting to fight and burn it all down in the same wistful tones as she does comparing her love to the planets and stars. The first comment, in English: “David Lynch didn't die, he was reincarnated as a girl with dark curly hair from Spain.” Or, as she sings in “I Gotta Feeling”: “Quiero ser como yo.” Amore just wants to be herself.