GENRE; Pop/ R&B / Experimental
LABEL; Sonamos
REVIEWED; 19 November, 2025
RATING; 8.0
Juana Molina’s DOGA arrives like a slow, curious tide — patient, inscrutable and quietly mischievous. After an eight-year gap, Molina distills years of home-studio improvisations into a record that favors mood and miniature revelation over conventional hooks. The album unfurls in hypnotic loops, analog synth murmurs and soft, idiosyncratic percussion, with Molina’s honeyed, half-spoken Spanish lines anchoring the drift into oddly friendly unease.
What feels most radical is how DOGA constructs tiny ecosystems: insectile hums, distant animal cries and plucked guitar fragments are arranged with a sculptor’s attention so that each repetition reveals a new angle or shadow. Songs like “Uno es árbol” and “Desinhumano” resist verse-chorus logic, instead functioning as conversational vignettes or ritualized murmurs that reward patient listening. The lead single, “Siestas Ahí,” teases the album’s blend of domestic intimacy and uncanny textures — a tune that threads humor and disquiet through looping motifs.
Molina’s production choices are deceptively brave. She lets ideas breathe and mutate, often leaving space where other artists would force resolution; the result is music that feels alive, sometimes mischievous, sometimes mournful, and frequently hilarious in an off-kilter way. DOGA’s material began as long improvisational sessions with keyboardist Odín Schwartz and was refined over several years which helps explain its conversational, improvisatory pulse.
Across its runtime the album confirms Molina’s status as a singular architect of experimental pop, someone who invents her own grammar of repetition, voice and texture. DOGA feels like an invitation to inhabit a private, generative world where the familiar becomes strange and the strange becomes intimate; critics have responded in kind, noting its uncanny but generous charms.
In its delicious unpredictability DOGA rewards not instant gratification but repeated, curious returns — Juana Molina’s most quietly audacious record yet, truly remarkable.
