On Friday, singer Diogo Piçarra releases the album “SNTMNTL”, which reads ‘sentimental’ but is much more than that, in which he ventures into electronic music, but without ever losing his essence.
In an interview with Lusa, Diogo Piçarra said that whenever he shared the name of his new work with anyone, “people would think ‘here comes romance'”.
But “SNTMNTL” is something else, “mainly because of the electronics and some of the lyrics”. It was to make this clear in the title that he ended up removing the vowels from the word, deconstructing it, making its “meaning more aggressive and a little more provocative”.
“And that’s what I wanted the title to mean. It reads sentimental, but it doesn’t just mean sentimental,” he explained.
In addition, the successor to “South Side Boy”, released in 2019, was born in a new reality, “above all post-pandemic, but also artificial intelligence, social networks, digital platforms.”
Although on the new album Diogo Piçarra assumes a change in musical path, this is not “100%”, since “the essence is always there”, in the songs “that take people back to the first works”.
“But I certainly have some songs that are a little more ‘exploratory’, in that I’ve ventured a little further into electronic styles that I hadn’t ventured into before, and even some lyrics that I hadn’t tackled before,” he said.
For those who follow Diogo Piçarra’s work, the focus on electronic music “won’t come as a surprise”. “I’d already released a few things like this, and I’d already delved a little into drum ‘n’ bass and house,” he said.
If there was any ‘shock’ it would have been with “Dialeto”, from the album “do=s” (2017), “because of the song itself, which is more ‘tropical house’, and with the lyrics ‘bye bye bye’, people were like ‘hey, what’s coming?’, but of course the essence was all there.”
“Electronic music has been very present in my life ever since, both on record and in concert. Since then, I’ve invited dancers to be part of the show. It makes perfect sense and there’s always a moment of dance. So I don’t think it will be strange at all, people will expect it because it’s always combined with pop,” he said.
Diogo Piçarra has always listened to electronic music, always, or mostly, sung in English.
“The challenge is to try to transform that style and adapt it to our language, which isn’t easy, it doesn’t always work with every musical style, with all the words that exist in the world. I’ve been digging, researching and also trying to evolve in that sense, in production and writing, and trying to choose the right words that can match the electronics I’ve been using, and I’m happy with the result,” he said.
Diogo Piçarra enlisted the help of several electronic producers, such as Tom Martin, Stego and Holly, to help him produce the songs.
“Having other producers helping me with production or post-production is giving me another vision that I’m not expecting at all and that I really need, because I want the music to go in a different direction,” he said.
On his new album, Diogo Piçarra is not only changing his music, but also his lyrics, and this can be seen in one of the first singles, “Não te odeio” (I don’t hate you), in which he talks about “not wanting to have false and toxic people around”. “I’ve never talked about it before, but I’ve been feeling it since the beginning, for a long time,” he shared.
The musician wants the new work to be “complete in every way – musically and visually”, which is why the songs have videos, “which refer to questions of robotics”.
Diogo Piçarra has revealed that this will also be happening on stage. Diogo Piçarra performs on April 13 at the Rosa Mota Pavilion in Porto and on April 20 at Campo Pequeno in Lisbon.
