Bomba Estéreo divided its 2021 album Deja into Agua, Aire, Tierra and Fuego. The four names can seem to promise a story about everyone and everywhere. Li Saumet explained through Sony Music that the group was thinking about connection to other people, the planet and ourselves in a life crowded by electronic devices. The useful test of that idea is its scale. An element is too broad to tell us who makes the music or how a particular place enters it. The documented production of Deja gives those headings a much more specific address.
Saumet and Simón Mejía built an improvised studio at her home in Santa Marta, rather than beginning from an anonymous recording facility. Sony’s account situates the work on Colombia’s Caribbean coast during the pandemic. Mejía named guitarist José Castillo and percussionist Efraín “Pacho” Cuadrado among the musicians bringing new composition ideas to the group. These details matter because a record organized around natural forces was also shaped by decisions at home: which people to invite, what they contributed and how a group’s established language might change when other musicians entered the process.
Li’s collaboration with Lido Pimienta gives another concrete meaning to connection. In the label’s account, Li says she wanted to test new possibilities for her voice with an old friend; Pimienta brought the Cuban duo OKAN into the project. Li also describes feeling supported by the presence of more women. Li’s account makes support part of the collaboration. It gives the album’s collective language a human shape: trust and invitation are choices, and the resulting music belongs to relationships with names.
“Tierra,” one of the album’s songs, acquired a further public frame in its 2022 video. Sony records the participation of Zapotec artist Lukas Avendaño and director Fana Adjani in an Oaxaca shoot. Mejía described the song and video as a tribute to the bond between people and the territory they inhabit, irrespective of race, identity or nationality. Released after the album, the video carries one elemental heading into a new collaboration and a stated claim about belonging.
Mejía called Deja a communal effort and dedicated it, among others, to Daniel Bustos, who led its recording and later died. The released album also names Nigerian singer Yemi Alade on “Conexión Total.” These are different kinds of contribution, and a wide concept should not make them interchangeable. The strongest meaning of Deja’s four-part design lies in the tension between its planetary vocabulary and the credited people who gave the project a local, collaborative life.