Renaldo & Clara: just words for complex feelings

Barcelona"I feel respected and valued, and at the same time isolated," says Clara Viñals (Lleida, 1990). Always at the helm of the Renaldo & Clara project, for more than a decade she has been spreading talent and insight in songs that address love and pop, avoiding clichés and lazy rhymes. She now releases the album L'encant (Primavera Labels, 2026), nine songs that validate the perception already conveyed by L'amor fa calor (2020) and La boca aigua (2023), albums that mixed urban rhythms with pop sensibility and a firm poetic delicacy. "I am very satisfied with the trajectory, and many people, also many musicians, have told me they really like what I do, but there is also a bit of an outsider", she explains. It's not a complaint, but an acknowledgment of Renaldo & Clara's position in the Catalan musical context: an artistic project that offers a quality refuge and the possibility of listening to love songs as unique as Gener, Tinc paraules, Amb tu podria estar and Quines coses de mi. A refuge surely shared by other artists like Mallorcan Maria Jaume, and which deserves more popular recognition.

L'encant

is the result of the musical adventures of Renaldo & Clara's previous two albums, but without the intention of continuity. "I love the previous two albums, but I had already explored that sound, and now, without abandoning the electronic, I felt like going back a bit to doing things I hadn't done in a while, like, for example, incorporating some more organic instruments and not making rhythm the main focus. This makes the rhythmic patterns more blurred, and the album calmer," says Viñals. There is also less harshness than in some of the lyrics of La boca aigua. What doesn't change is the "obsession" of starting the album with the happiest, most pop track. In this case, Amb tu podria estar, a love song without metaphors. "I wanted to make a more direct and transparent love song, without it sounding cheesy. And with very simple but very well-crafted lyrics in terms of rhyme, and with a certain structural complexity. It doesn't have an obvious chorus, but at the same time all the parts function as a kind of chorus," she explains.

One of Renaldo & Clara's charms is their look at desire and the uncertainties of love, always with the right words for complex feelings. As an example, what they propose in the song Gener, about a person who expresses "a certain curiosity" about what their partner has done with other people before being with them. The way they arrange the verses removes the weight of retrospective jealousy, but brings to the table the catalog of small insecurities that emerge in relationships. However, they do not do so with the dramatic overacting that opens the doors to spite, but "from admiration" for the other, a perspective less prone to categorical verses, but much more artistically stimulating, as they do in Quines coses de mi. For reasons like this, Clara Viñals is also a benchmark.