From her music alone, you might not register Akriila as a Beatles fan. The genre-bending Chilean rapper and singer’s catalogue is breathlessly eclectic and digital: she broke out in 2023 with a trap mixtape, ‘001’, and followed up a year later with a noise-perreo-grunge-drum’n’bass mesh of a debut album, ‘Epistolares’. You can hear bedroom alt-pop and indie rock in her latest singles – which include ‘Suave’, featuring digicore star Jane Remover. It’s this elasticity and energy that make Akriila one of the most exciting emerging artists right now.
But when NME catches up with the 22-year-old, she’s excited for her maiden trip to the UK, and is hoping to take her dad with her. “He is a Beatles fanatic,” she smiles. Her new album makes her admiration of the Fab Four even clearer: its title ‘Lucy Miró Al Mundo Y Notó Que Está Girando, Es Mi Segundo Disco’ nods to both ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ and George Harrison’s ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’. (Its English title is ‘Lucy Looked At The World, And Noticed That It’s Spinning’, leaves off the literal explanation on the end: “This is my second album.”)
And while it’s not quite hit the level of Beatlemania yet, Akriila has built a swooning, loyal fanbase of her own, selling out her first-ever US headline tour – including three back-to-back dates in New York – in July. Her fans have also embraced a slogan of sorts from ‘Epistolares’: “Hot gays listen to Akriila.” The artist, affectionately known as Akrii, has been open about her queer identity, sporting a tank top stamped with the word ‘LESBIAN’ in past press photos.
“[Representation] is important because it’s who I am,” she says. “When I was growing up, songs were only about women talking about men and men talking about women.” When she first heard the music of queer artists, she felt a greater sense of belonging, and is happy that ‘Hot gays listen to Akriila’ has catalysed the same sense of community for her fans. “It’s playful and catchy. I love it.”
Akriila on The Cover of NME. Credit: Lo Harley for NME‘Lucy…’ is set to catapult Akriila, now an Atlantic Records artist, to a new level. Speaking over video call from a small village in Switzerland, where she’s just visited the museum of visionary Alien artist H.R. Giger, she is less interested in defining Lucy as a character and more keen to share one of its visual inspirations: the series ‘She Is So Hot I Wanna Clean Her Room’ by the Ukrainian artist shelestvetrovki. “They are pictures of girls in really messy rooms – this album feels like that,” she explains in her slow, somewhat deadpan cadence. What could come off as disinterest reveals itself as deliberation, her pauses only so she can answer with as much depth and thought as possible.
“Everything is completely messy; you’re looking only at your own problems, extremely self-centred,” she elaborates. “Then there comes a turning point: a real ray of light has to come in through the window for you to understand there is more out there. That the world is turning and I’m growing.”
It was in her own bedroom that Akriila, real name Fernanda Sepúlveda, started her music journey: during COVID-19 as a guitar-wielding teenager in Maipu, a residential suburb in west Santiago. Chile’s lockdown was strict, complete with armed forces patrolling to check whether civilians had permission slips to go outside, which authorities granted sparingly. The pandemic had followed six months of protests in the city over inequality and the cost of living, which were in turn met with violent state repression and curfews. This protracted period of social paralysis heavily skewed the expected trajectory for Chilean youth of schooling age.
Credit: Lo Harley for NME“I was part of a generation that didn’t know what to do, whether to go to university. I was lost,” she says. “In the pandemic, I pushed myself to understand what I wanted, and music was very present. Then I started to release it, without thinking about anything specific.”
Raised on her father’s love of The Beatles and South American rock, Akriila learned how to play the lucid, swirling songs of 1970s Argentine psych-folk band Sui Generis, and picked up the complex strum techniques of Chile’s political nueva canción movement, spearheaded by 1950s folk hero Violeta Parra.
“I never formally learnt guitar, but I just started learning songs,” she says. She calls her first songs stripped-back acoustic ‘ballads’; one she wrote at that time, ‘Carta A Mi Papa’, became the last track on ‘Epistolares’. A folky track that smears electronic ambience onto the staccato strums of the nueva canción, it’s the song that encapsulates Akriila’s artistry: beneath all the layers of production, there is a core that is present, poetic and complex.
“I was part of a generation that didn’t know what to do… In the pandemic, I pushed myself to understand what I wanted”
When Santiago woke from its long pandemic slumber, the city’s trap scene reactivated and began moving at a frantic pace. Akriila got swept up in it. “There were loads of events in underground places, and I went to all of them. Everyone saw me all the time. It was cool, a lot of experimentation, very small, we all knew each other.”
Santiago’s urban scene already had a solid foundation: a mesh of hip-hop, neo-perreo, pop and trap, which Akriila had listened to avidly. She tapped into all of that, collaborating with a fresh wave of adventurous peers including Harry Nach, Kidd Voodoo and FaceBrooklyn, as well as producers like Saito Ape, Vinco and Red Fingers. In the process of forming her distinctive and layered sound, she frequently dipped into other genres but steered back to reggaeton as she didn’t want her music to sound too “gringo”, she says. “I experimented a lot, but I lacked that Latin sound and I needed that sensation. Something more danceable, tracks that were more aligned to how I grew up, with reggaeton and trap.”
Credit: Lo Harley for NMEAkriila is adept at matching the mood of a song with liquid lyricism and flexible flow. Her swagger is undeniable on the reggaeton tracks from ‘Epistolares’ (on ‘Epitafio’: “I’ve got other girls, mami, it’s always been that way”; on ‘Popper!’, “I’ve got a girl with a crazy hot ass”). But she can also radiate intensity, like on the echoing ambient drum’n’bass track ‘Mal Comunicada’ – “I gift you the skin that stayed under your painted nails” – or the aforementioned ‘Cartas A Mi Papa’: “I saw you, sitting at the window, looking at the grass you never watered”.
Akriila’s voice is often manipulated and glitched. “I love Auto-Tune,” she declares. “It’s a filter, an effect, but it filters something real. I can become a character that’s more playful, for example. My recordings are based on sensation. If I say a word wrong, but it feels right, I prefer that than going back to record it again ‘correctly’.”
Credit: Lo Harley for NMEOn ‘Epistolares’, Akriila’s goal was “to find the balance between the ethereal and the destruction and how they could live together with Auto-Tune”. The album’s lead producer, Heartgaze, has described himself in interviews as a maximalist – not just in his penchant for clashing layers within one song, but also how they’d end a reggaeton-powered album with a folk track: keeping listeners on edge and being unpredictable, always.
On ‘Lucy…’, Akriila’s universe pivots, contracts, implodes and rebuilds. “I’m not exaggerating when I say it has a bit of everything,” she teases. “More analogue, more saturation, flutes, piano, blown-out bass, with the pedals and layers of the guitar as the connecting thread.”
“My recordings are based on sensation. If I say a word wrong, but it feels right, I prefer that”
Her proudest moment on the album comes midway on ‘Thank U Music’, a relatively slow-moving electronic track with twangy synths that exude warmth, like a ray of light to the face. It opens with a quote from a 1976 interview with Patti Smith: “Material things they just didn’t matter, what mattered to me was developing my mind.” “Before ‘Thank U Music’, I felt like everything was colliding. Flutes, piano, silence, house, techno… Everything contradicted itself,” Akriila explains. “I loved the Patti interview, I cut it out and put it in myself. It’s the turning point on the record. It gives me goosebumps.”
Through a multitude of snippets and samples, the likes of George Harrison, PJ Harvey and Rosalía all flit in and out of the album. “There’s a lot of things happening,” Akriila offers, struggling to find the words to explain. “It revealed itself during the process of creating it. The first songs are raw, humiliating, more playful in terms of drums and melodies. Then there is that breaking point, where everything becomes more hopeful, then goes back to that rawness.”
Expectations back home for the album are especially high. When news broke that she had signed to Atlantic, the Chilean press heralded her as the biggest artist to have ever come out of the country. “I’m doing well,” she replies when asked about the pressure. “It’s a bit weird; the Chilean news made it such a huge deal. Many other Chilean artists are on important labels. Neither my team, my label, or myself are doing it to be number one in everything. We just love the music, we believe in it and know where we want to go, which is why I feel calm. There’s a coherence in the project, the visuals, the shows, that is going beyond Chile. That’s my favourite part: live it in different places, meet people, sing together. That’s beautiful to me, and I’m fucking grateful.”
Akriila’s ‘Lucy Miró Al Mundo Y Notó Que Está Girando, Es Mi Segundo Disco’ is out September 3 via Atlantic Records.
Listen to Akriila’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Charis McGowan
Photography: Lo Harley
Styling: Akriila, Papymlova
Hair: Charles Stanley
Makeup: Tom Easto
Location: Studio Monde
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