Meet Daniela Andrade, Billboard’s newest Latin Artist on The Rise.
From singing gospel and Christian music as a child, to releasing her first experimental covers in YouTube as a teenager, 27-year-old Daniela Andrade has found a voice for her pent-up frustrations in Tamale, which is plotted out like the story line of her childhood.
The deeply personal set — which is her latest self-released EP Crooked Lid Records — follows a series of singles that have garnered tens of millions of streams on Spotify, where Andrade has over 1 million monthly listeners.
This new material, she says, hits closer to home. Being born in Canada to Honduran parents took a psychological toll in her life as the youngest of four siblings who grew up among immigrants in an area with few Latinos.
“I grew up in a city where it was mostly Filipinos, Koreans, Somalians, Lebanese immigrants,” Andrade tells Billboard by phone. “I went to a Dutch high school and didn’t realize how being the only Honduran affected me until I got older.”
In 2018, two years after the release of her debut EP Shore, a first trip to her parents’ native Honduras was abruptly halted due to the civil unrest the country was undergoing. “People were setting the highways on fires, it was an apocalyptic moment,” she remembers. Andrade instead looked into Mexico as an alternative to cure her urge to connect with her Hispanic roots. “There was a strange feeling of arriving somewhere where you feel is a part of you, but you’ve never been there before,” she says, looking back with nostalgia.
Stepping on Latino ground became a path into self-discovery and a deep dive into a conglomerate of music genres. Andrade’s musical narrative thus conveys, unambiguously, a representation of her life experiences that reject dramatic structures: her sound overflows with melodic turns, with spiraling R&B textures and neo-soul, with innocuous reflections and colorful electronic and sensory pulsations; the antithesis music palette of an unfulfilled musician.
Tamale is a doting homage to her relationship with her parents, a cathartic experience and a way out of a spiral of unreconciled emotions. “As I grew older, I was able to explore all these different genres and styles that allowed me to connect so much more to my own culture in a way that my parents don’t realize,” she adds.
“They were surprised that I wanted to create a visual narrative of their hardships as immigrants with ‘Gallo Pinto,’” she says, referring to her first single which has over 260,000 views on Youtube. “It’s helping us as a family, specifically my relationship with them through my music, and to realize that I’m so fortunate to live this life in Canada they built for me with such sacrifice.”
Journeying from a period of great digital reception with covers on YouTube to welcoming a space of worldwide exposure with original songs, Andrade has finally found a place of musical maturity she is enjoying with ease. “I am going to identify with Tamale the rest of my life,” she continues. “It feels genuine. With my other productions I was trying to find myself, it was a maturity process, but with Tamale I have finally tuned in to where I’m going.”
Learn more about this week’s Latin Artist on the Rise below.
Biggest Accomplishment: “Learning to follow my intuition musically and doubting it less. I’ve never had any formal training in music but at the end of the day I think all music comes from raw emotion. In the process of making Tamale I discovered a real love for production.”
Recommended Song: “’Ayayai.’ It’s one of the songs that one could really vibe to. I find myself replaying it, it’s so nice to dance to aside from the fact that it’s all in Spanish.”
What’s next for Daniela Andrade? “Working on music videos for Tamale. The most recent is the album’s title track, which celebrates my Honduran heritage and female empowerment. Also, we are locking in dates for my first worldwide tour and looking forward to covering Central America, of course.”
