Lido Pimienta's Sublime Caribbean Symphony
On her new album 'La Belleza,' the Colombian Canadian artist wrote music for a 66-person orchestra—upending European classical traditions in the process.
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.
