Lido Pimienta's Sublime Caribbean Symphony

I have thought about Lido Pimienta every single day of 2025—in part because I bought a gorgeous calendar she made to raise funds for building a school in her native Colombia. Whenever I sit at my writing desk, I look at the lovely round faces Pimienta drew for the calendar, which inspires me and helps me keep track of what the hell day it is. So when the musician and visual artist pops up on a Zoom screen from Toronto it’s almost disorienting, like I’m speaking to Mother Time. 

That loopy feeling soon dissipates. Pimienta is immediately warm and super-sharp. She wants to make sure I received the detailed lyric booklet that accompanies her ambitious and stunning fourth album, La Belleza. “When you experience the album, I hope you have the lyrics in front of you as if you were in an opera,” she says decisively. “I just thought that it would be nice to do that. But then, you know, when you're brown and you do anything that's European, it's like, ‘Wow, thinkpiece.’”

We’re speaking a little more than a month before this week’s release of La Belleza, and she’s right to anticipate how it might be regarded: It’s a 30-minute classical album with nine movements and an overture recorded with a full, 66-musician orchestra, Orquesta Filarmónica de Medellín. On paper, it’s an unexpected shift from the electronic experiments and Afro-Colombian styles of her 2020 album Miss Colombia. But we’re talking about Lido Pimienta, an artist with an astonishing sense of melody, immutable ties to her home, and a cogent sense of who she is; the instruments have changed, but Lido has not. 

If you follow along with the opera booklet you will hear a sacred choral track for liberation; orchestral reggaetón with strings and a literal aria on a dembow riddim; a vallenato with an abstract clarinet solo; and a delicate harp song about mangos that doubles as her sexual opus. “I'm not being literal, but children, please don't listen to this kind of song,” she laughs, incredulous. “I wrote a porno! Do you not see?!” 

Pimienta has always been a storyteller, and each of her projects is like an artist’s diary of her thought processes and musical progression. Plus, she noticed the way her last album was categorized as exotic despite its bouncy synths and club-ready percussion, and she sought to challenge the way she’d been viewed by the Anglo world. “I’m already pretty outspoken. I know I’m never going to be a mainstream artist,” she says. “However, it is problematic when no matter what music I make, I am relinquished into the ‘world music’ aisle. So I thought, What happens if I make an album that is only orchestral music?” Which is to say—if she writes an album with the same ingenuity of Miss Colombia but with European instrumentation, will she still be othered by the Anglo establishment? 

It’s an experiment that feels preordained, but it’s also much bigger than that. “It is very interesting to locate indigenous people in the same framework as Europeans, so that we can humanize indigeneity more too,” she tells me.

This story of La Belleza begins, as so many still do, at the outset of the pandemic. In April 2020, Pimienta had just released Miss Colombia, which propelled her to greater renown—but Covid waylaid her plans for a tour. She was living in a small, expensive apartment with her three children and husband. “My marriage was in shambles,” she says. Like always she was dreaming about being back in La Guajira, not knowing when she’d be able to see her home country again. Lacking physical escape, there was nothing left to do but retreat to a studio outside Toronto and let her mind be the portal. “Then the music started coming to me,” she says. 

In isolation, she challenged herself to write and arrange music first for an eight-piece brass ensemble, then a string quartet. Her ambition to tackle classical arrangements was broadening further when she got a call from the choreographer Andrea Miller, who asked Pimienta to compose music for a piece she was making for the New York City Ballet. In turn, Pimienta applied orchestral instruments to high-art styles-of-the-people like Colombian vallenato and Dominican dembow.

The world opened up. The marriage improved. And Pimienta could finally tour Miss Colombia, as well as perform alongside the ballerinas in New York. But internally, she was still on edge; a former member of her team, she says, had mismanaged her money. “People are like, ‘Miss Colombia is groundbreaking!’ And I'm like, I'm broke,” Pimienta says. “I’m basically $2 away from being bankrupt, $2 away from having to move from my Toronto apartment to another town with my three kids. But I still need to write this music.” 

Pimienta had already written an album’s worth of MIDI songs for a full orchestra. “I tackled it like I would make any other pop song, only the synth line would be now grouped to the percussion and the string and the oboes and the piccolos or whatever,” she says. After enlisting her friend and celebrated composer Owen Pallett to transcribe her work to sheet music, she called up two Colombian orchestras to see if they would work with her. The Orquesta Filarmónica de Medillín got back to her first, and lacking the funds to pay them, she negotiated a deal in which they would play on her album and, in return, she would perform a show for them “any day that you want, any year that you want, and I won’t get paid for it.”

It was all very last-minute, complicated by the problems with the former team member, she says, and she was still writing and arranging music up to the point that she delivered it to her label, Anti. The pressure was overwhelming. “I was clinically depressed. I had two instances where I tried to”—here she makes a noise with her mouth, implying self-harm. “It just got really, really dark. So it took the work of my family and my friends to help me with the music and bring me up again. So, even when I say the line ‘Que vive el Caribe, libre,’ it was kind of like: I want the Caribbean to be free, the diaspora to be free, but I also want me to be free.”

Pimienta found freedom in part from something she refers to as the “Caribbean sublime,” a concept that subverts the academic definition of aesthetic greatness that was taught to her when she was getting her degrees in art criticism and curation at the Ontario College of Art and Design. “I approach my work very much as if I’m writing a thesis or presenting a dissertation, even though I hate academia,” she says. “It’s like my love-hate relationship to any Westernized education—or even ‘classical music’ versus ‘world music.’ ‘World music’ is just the classical music of brown people, but it’s just so racist when they talk in those terms.” It’s a lament that Latine musicians have been expressing, and trying to upend, for decades.

She continues: “When I think about the sublime, I’m not thinking about a white man looking into the distance as he’s looking at the vast land that he’s about to conquer. To me, the sublime is a woman carrying a child on her hip, holding some plantain in her hand in a plastic bag, while she’s wearing curlers. She’s walking down the street in her flip-flops, talking to her neighbor who is doing the same thing. For me, it’s sublime when there is a group of people in a raggedy-ass car blasting music while everyone’s asleep, but no one is going to call the police on you because you’re having a good time—and collectively, we understand your right to joy.”

So much of La Belleza’s beauty comes from this understanding, even if several of its songs express the frisson of these deeper questions and the low place Pimienta was in as she was writing it. Her voice is perpetually clear and so well-suited to the kind of operatic keening that define songs like “¿Quién Tiene La Luz? El Perdón,” in which she expresses such a deeply felt sorrow that you feel you could die of heartbreak just by listening. But she’s also full of a kind of joy that feels like resistance. The album ends with her singing the title lyric of “Busca La Luz”—look for the light—with her voice soaring skyward, like she’s riding into the horizon on a pegasus. Or maybe just walking down the street in her flip-flops, greeting everyone with a warm smile.