Judeline Is the Ethereal Spanish Artist You Need to Know

The singer Judeline — whose real name is Lara Fernández Castrelo — has always let her imagination guide her. Growing up, she was a dreamy kid in a tiny, 200-person seaside town called Los Caños de Meca. There, she’d put on elaborate shows for her family, pretending to be a singer or a model sashaying down the runway. And though her community was small, she was constantly surrounded by music: Her dad, who’d settled in Spain from Venezuela, taught her to play the cuatro, and her mom would take her to see flamenco cantaoras late into the night.

All of it helped her envision what it would be like to get beyond Los Caños de Meca and into unchartered territory. “I think I drew influences from all over, all of these things I’d seen growing up,” Judeline explains. As a teenager, she moved to Madrid and began experimenting with local producers, mixing her ethereal vocals with a love for off-kilter, spellbinding beats. A collaboration with the artist and multihyphenate Alizz blew up online and got her attention in Spain; in 2022, her EP de la luz won praise from artists like Bad Bunny and Rosalia, to whom she’s often been compared.

Since she started making music, the 21-year-old artist constantly created characters and personas. One that kept popping up was Angel-A, a woman she couldn’t seem to shake from her songs. “I always loved that name and, for a while, I was sad that I had called myself Judeline,” she says with a laugh. (Judeline actually took her name from the Beatles song “Hey Jude.”) She started writing from the perspective of Angel-A, eventually shaping a story that’d become her debut album, Bodhiria. The LP, out Oct. 25, is a gorgeous, labyrinthine narrative of a woman trapped in a surreal kind of afterlife, desperate for her lover to remember her. “The album represents those highs and lows — it takes you through that journey,” Judeline says.

The LP starts with “bodhitale,” a spoken-word intro in which the album character confesses her love to the person she wants to be with and tells him how deeply connected they are. (She cleverly credits the song as being by Judeline, featuring Angel-A.) It’s on the haunting “Luna Roja” that Judeline’s protagonist starts to realize her lover is forgetting her, making way for more intense sounds on the album. “That’s kind of the point where it descends into something more toxic,” Judeline says. The hurried “Joropo” follows; it’s a standout that experiments with the Venezuelan genre of the same name while adding in ripples of Autotune and electronic-driven flourishes.

The plot twist works well for Judeline’s voice and style: Her vocals are ethereal and incandescent when they need to be, despairing and frantic during the album’s more intense turns. “I feel like I played with my voice a lot [on this album],” she says. “I usually sing very quietly — but for example on ‘Joropo,” I break with that.” The album also serves as a look at the cutting-edge talent among a new generation of Spanish artists: Judeline teams up with the ever-intriguing artist/producer Rusowsky on “Heavenly,” while Rusowsky’s longtime collaborator Ralphie Choo — who just worked on the Rosalia track “Omega”—appears in the production credits a few times. Other production highlights come from Tuiste and Mayo, whom Judeline has been working with for years, and Judeline herself.

For her, the entire album has been a process — one that’s allowed her to keep leveling up and finding new avenues as an artist. “Above all, this was a lot of learning — it’s much harder than I imagined to finish a project,” Judeline says. Still, she’s hoping her listeners walk away with a clear vision of the ideas she had, and the imagery that existed only in her head before she finished Bodhiria. “I would want it to take people somewhere, for scenes, moments, and feelings to appear in their heads,” she says. “I would be happy if it really moved something inside them.”