Introducing... Ana Lua Caiano

Time has moved fast for Ana Lua Caiano. Strangely, the COVID-19 pandemic set the grounds for the meteoric rise of the 24-year-old Portuguese singer-songwriter. In 2020, once the lockdown came into effect, she directed all attention and creativity to an exercise she undertook with her sister to keep them both busy: Ana Lua would write a new song each week, while Joana put together a video to go along with it. Locked in her bedroom due to the circumstances, Ana Lua unexpectedly found the identity of her solo project. She would build songs using rhythmic instruments (bass drum, adufe, brinquinho) inspired by Portuguese traditions from the Beira Alta, Madeira and Minho regions. Then she would add keyboards and her clever lyrics over melodies that boldly followed the heritage of Portugal’s protest song movement of the 1970s.

Suddenly, it was all there, an enticing and mature musical language, as if Caiano, secluded in her bedroom, was born as a full-grown artist. Maybe because she is part of a generation that no longer thinks in terms of genre or categorisation, her music is a stunning combination of her greatest influences. “My parents love Portuguese singer-songwriters and traditional music, which I would listen to from a very early age, during our car trips,” Caiano tells me. “On the other hand, there was a period when I was obsessed with Portishead, Björk, even Chico Buarque and Cesária Évora.” And when you put all these pieces together, namely the traditional-inspired repertoire of Portugal’s José Afonso, José Mário Branco and Fausto with the digital wizardry of trip-hop and electronica artists, you can easily find the outline for Caiano’s electro-trad stylings.

Going from complete anonymity to one of the most praised and sought-after musicians in recent Portuguese music only took Caiano a couple of brilliant EPs: Cheguei Tarde a Ontem (2022) and Se Dançar É Só Depois (2023). Live on stage, she showcases her personal songwriting process, looping snippets of rhythms and vocals, adding keyboards and repetitive melodies, incrementally fashioning the accompaniment to her wonderfully expressive voice.

Now that she is finally releasing her debut album, Vou Ficar Neste Quadrado (I Shall Stay in this Square), Caiano is returning to that initial collection of songs written during the pandemic, reworking them with the benefits of hindsight and experience, her words accruing fresh layers of meaning. “I looked back on what I had done at the time and figured out how these songs could still make sense now,” she says. So, even though she is still singing about a menacing ‘bug’ on the loose, the need to keep your distance, sticking to personal spaces and routines, rule-making and rule-breaking, it now allows for quite different meanings: psychological, political and social.

Working alone, Caiano maintains her creative ethic and integrity – twirling a spool of measuring tape around her head to supply a sound effect on ‘Os Meus Sapatos Não Tocam nos Teus’ or recording a rare Portuguese dialect for ‘Bom, Vai Ficar Assim por Hoje’ – building her songs with whatever is at hand. That can mean a mundane object laying on her workspace or drawing on the music she has carried with her since childhood. It is all part of the same artistic thinking: she is everything around her.

This article originally appeared in the June 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today