Sensuality and fragility: two sides of the same coin in Guitarricadelafuente

BarcelonaGuitarricadelafuente, a loving diminutive of "guitar" in Aragon combined with his first surname (Álvaro Lafuente Calvo), presents his new album Spanish leather (Sony) on a tour that took him to the Alma Festival in Barcelona on July 2nd and 3rd. One of the tasks that attendees usually do when they attend a concert of this type is to learn the lyrics and familiarize themselves with the melodies of the songs. I can confirm that the audience in the Plaza Mayor of Poble Espanyol had done their homework: they accompanied the singer throughout the hour and a half concert, completely devoted to the cause. Lately, it's quite common—although it still surprises me—for the audience to record the entire concert with their cell phones and watch it through the small screen, when they have the artist right in front of them, in the flesh. Okay, let's get to the point.

The beginning of the concert opened with the song Full time daddy, where she explores commitment, whether in love, in a project or in musical creation, with a dedication without hesitation or half measures, as is her second album. Spanish leather It is a journey of intimate transformation experienced by Álvaro Lafuente Calvo, who at a certain point in his life decides to leave his village and move to the city, specifically to Barcelona, ​​​​where he has lived for several years. This decision involves many things. After the successful The quarry (2022)This album takes him through territories where sensuality and fragility intertwine like two essential aspects of Spanish musical tradition. With a fresh and fearless perspective, he reinvents this legacy, combining it with fusion, local roots, and the grit of contemporary pop. He replaces the genre's conventional narratives with intensely personal experiences: those of an ordinary kid who faces the universal dilemmas of his generation, but who doesn't go any further.

Thus, he creates a new folklore, profoundly contemporary and with rather strident sounds, where percussion and bass play a major role, to the point that, at times, we long for the power he achieves with the most stripped-down songs, in which the voice and guitar are alone and demand a more intimate and smaller space to find ourselves.

In Spanish leather, the singer from Benicàssim—influenced by his roots in Cuevas de Cañart (in the Maestrazgo region of Aragon), where he spent his summers—delves into the complex tension between desire and loss, between fleeting pleasure and the need for authentic connection, between overflowing hypersensitivity and living without filters. His lyrics, full of images that sometimes have little semantic coherence, but are poetic and sonorous (as he himself has stated in interviews), take us through emotional landscapes of uncertainty, growth, unrequited sexual desire, and a constant search for meaning and identity that, at times, falls into the superficial and hypersexualized.

Deep fears coexist in the texture of his voice and his very special timbre: the fear of betrayal, the perpetuity of the digital self, and the desire to validate one's own existence, oscillating between reality and appearance, between the intensity of the moment and longing.

The album revolves around a constant dialectic between heritage and the future, between the echoes of tradition and the call of what must come, both in love and in musical culture and identity. His gaze toward the past is neither nostalgic nor idealized; it is driven toward hedonism: he revisits it to better understand the present and himself. This gesture becomes the album's guiding thread, a kind of coming-of-age sound novel in which the protagonist leaves behind the town where he grew up to enter the vertigo of the new and turbulent world of the city. The result is a chronicle of the transition to maturity, an ode to discovery and, at the same time, a reflection on the loss of depth in modern life, without denying its richness and contradictions.

In this process, Guitarricadelafuente contrasts the desire to belong—to a land, a memory, a community—with the equally strong drive to break free. More than a reconciliation, it proposes a way to creatively navigate this tension. Her songs become territories where the private and the public, the singular and the generational, coexist fluidly. The album presents itself as an affirmation of her heritage, not as a burden, and as a space that can be reconstructed freely and boldly, but without compromise.

Spain is not just a setting, but an active presence in every corner of the album, from the titles that refer to specific places.Puerta del Sol, Babieca, Tramuntana, Pilgrim Port— to the way of speaking, hearing, and narrating that emerges from their lyrics. These spaces, physical or emotional, are charged with a mythical meaning and become universal settings where a sensitivity rooted in the everyday unfolds. The aesthetic approach involves a natural fusion of popular expressions and refined lyricism, between traditional forms of song and the heritage of the modern singer-songwriter, with broken voices and sudden changes in pitch. Bob Dylan, Mina, and Gino Paoli—whose song, Heaven in a room, appears reimagined in Tramontana—not as an explicit tribute, but as part of an artistic DNA that embraces diversity with coherence.

Ultimately, this second album by Guitarricadelafuente reveals itself as a work that points toward maturity, in which the poetic innocence of his beginnings coexists with a rawer, more conscious voice, capable of narrating confusion, passion, and the search for one's own place in the world. An album that speaks of him, but also of us.