Cazzu speaks without bitterness about her relationship with Nodal: "It was a great moment."

Argentine artist Julieta Emilia Cazzuchelli is revealing herself to the world for the first time without any artifice. Without the Nena Trampa persona with which she emerged in Latin trap. Without the appendage of "Christian Nodal's girlfriend" or "Inti's mom." Her greatest calling card, as it has been since she took to the stage singing cumbia as Juli-K, is her music.

The name of Cazzu's new album is "Latinaje." It's out this week and is a fusion of the most popular Latin American rhythms. It's also a mixture of the feelings she's experienced over the past three years: her romance with Nodal, the fear of losing that happiness, romantic love, sexual love, and maternal love. Betrayal and healing. It's a little bit of everything, and a lot of it is her and the life we've known and the life we haven't.

In an exclusive interview with the Mexican and Latin American edition of Vogue magazine , Cazzu gave a narrative to her album and hinted that she has healed from the end of her relationship with her daughter's father, the rapid start of the Mexican artist's romance and his subsequent wedding to Ángela Aguilar, and everything else she has lived, suffered and overcome.

'Latinaje', Cazzu's new album

"The first songs were born more than three years ago. During that time, I became a mother and discovered life from a different perspective. I was also in a relationship like I'd never experienced before. I had never imagined having a family, no matter how long it lasted, it was a great moment, a moment full of love, very beautiful and very hopeful. That necessarily influenced some of the songs: my love for my baby, life at that time, experiences of all kinds, and also my inner voices," she said about the influence of her relationship on her work.

"We worked hard on the majority of the songs in France, but others were from before and some from now," he explains, referring to the studio inside Chateau Miraval , the winery that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are still fighting over.

Her most profound transformation compared to her previous album is "that this woman wasn't a mother, above all. I think that's the biggest change. I didn't really believe in that story where people say that life and perspective on life change when you become a mother, but in truth, yes, it was true... It was quite true.

A career full of risks

For Cazzu, women's lives are complicated, even today, but even more so in her artistic career. "It happened to me in all walks of life. I saw my aunts, my mother, the women who inspired me, experiencing a lot of systematic injustice. In music, at university, in many places, I saw all of that, so yes, it was always my decision to make my music like hiding a bomb," she explained.

It was also a strong decision to show themselves without armor, starting with the first shot of the album: their song 'La Cueva'.

"That said, it was very risky for me, for my idea of myself. I love being the bad guy and being this super cool woman. I was really scared to show people the song I had written the first time I broke up; I didn't know what was coming next. It's also nice to remind people that we are inspired by our experiences, but that inspiration is full of fantasy and subjectivity."

"People listen to these songs that at times can be considered literal, but in reality they are purely my subjectivity and are wrapped in all this fantasy, that's why it's called inspiration and if it weren't like journalism it would be a real story, but music is not like that. People can receive it how they want to receive it, but La Cueva has my subjectivity, how I lived it, what I thought at the time and maybe I don't think it anymore, maybe the feeling is not identical to how it was in La Cueva . That's why it's nice to capture one's emotion and make the music, because afterwards the feelings are not replicated identically."

Premonitory?

"Something I tend to do a lot is that sometimes my life is perfect, but I have songs that imagine the worst. In fact, the song that opens the album is called 'Bad Luck', "I was born with so much bad luck," the song says and I wrote it at a great moment in my life, where everyone was saying "how the hell did you come up with this song if everything is fine?" The song talks about the fear of loss, when you're in love sometimes this ghost of what will happen when you lose everything creeps in. And then you lose everything and life goes on.

Now that the tide seems to have gone out, Cazzu or Julieta is reviving being a mother. "What I like to say about my motherhood is that I don't think everyone has the privileges I had when I became a mother, and that's why the experience of motherhood necessarily changes according to the privileges of women. Women who don't have the privilege of staying home, raising their children and spending quality time with them, of playing, of being calm, because they have to go out to earn a living and are alone, or don't have anyone to help them, I don't think they experience it in the same way. That's why I don't like to generalize, and I think I've been very lucky when it came to being a mother."

And her fans are lucky. 'Latinaje' is a gem, and so is she.