Renaldo & Clara: fair words for complex feelings

Barcelona"I feel respected and valued, and at the same time isolated", says Clara Viñals (Lleida, 1990). Always at the forefront of the Renaldo & Clara project, for more than a decade she has been spreading talent and insight in songs that address love and pop, shying away from 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 blended urban rhythms with pop sensibility and a firm poetic delicacy. "I am very satisfied with my career, and many people, including many musicians, have told me they really like what I do, but there's also a bit of an outsider element", she explains. It's not a complaint, but an acceptance 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 Maria Jaume from Mallorca, and which deserves more popular recognition.

L'encant. A safe haven surely shared by other artists like the Majorcan Maria Jaume, and which deserves more popular impact.

La boca aigua. What doesn't change is the "obsession" of starting the album with the most cheerful, 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 sappy. And with very simple lyrics, but very well crafted 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 the charms of Renaldo & Clara 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 "certain curiosity" about what their partner has done with other people before being with them. The way they arrange the verses takes away the weight of retrospective jealousy, but it brings to the table the catalog of small insecurities that surface in couple relationships. However, they do not do so with the dramatic overacting that opens the doors to resentment, 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 reference.