When Daymé Arocena announced her 2024 album Alkemi, the record label described a new set of collaborations with Puerto Rican producer Eduardo Cabra and a turn toward neo-soul, Afro-Caribbean rhythm and pop. Its announcement called it her first album since 2019’s Sonocardiogram. That five-year interval could invite a tidy story about leaving jazz behind. Arocena’s own language refuses the neatness. For her, the title concerns transformation: elements mixed to produce something changed, not a subtraction that erases where the elements came from.
The album was recorded in Puerto Rico, according to Brownswood’s artist account. Geography matters without becoming a formula that explains every sound. A Cuban singer and a Puerto Rican producer working together can draw on shared Caribbean circuits while retaining different training, memories and choices. Cabra’s name deserves the credit the label gives him; Arocena’s decision to pursue the project deserves equal attention. The point is not that another island supplied a missing authenticity. It offered a place and team for an artist to attempt a different scale of song.
“A Fuego Lento,” featuring Dominican singer Vicente García and identified by the label as an Alkemi track, later received a Latin Grammy song-of-the-year nomination. A nomination confirms institutional attention; it does not tell us which part of a song listeners carried with them. More useful is the relation between the single and the album’s stated experiment. Rather than using a prize to certify a genre switch, it shows the new material entered a public field where a Cuban artist could be heard outside the role she had previously been assigned.
In a 2025 interview, Arocena spoke directly about the extra demands she sees placed on Black singers and about keeping her work rooted in her cubanía even when she explores different forms. She named Cabra and her collaborators as part of the record’s making. Those are the artist’s observations, not a universal verdict on every music industry decision. They make the common instruction to stay in one recognizable lane look less like respect for tradition and more like a limit someone else sets.
Arocena’s change of approach can be traced in the album’s collaborations and in her own account of choosing them. Alkemi does not need to prove that Afro-Cuban influence survives by reproducing the same arrangement from one album to the next. Its production story presents tradition as material an artist can work with, and her account insists on the right to decide how. Transformation belongs to the maker, not only to the audience that notices it afterward.