Review: LIDO PIMIENTA

LIDO-PIMIENTA-Caribenya-artwork-album-2026

After proving he can handle the heavy caliber of the academy between the score for the New York City Ballet and the Gregorian solemnities of “La Belleza,” Lido Pimienta returns home.

“Caribenya” is not a comfortable retreat, quite the opposite: it is an operation of cultural and political re-appropriation that rejects any exotic postcard. The title plays on the connection between the geography of the Caribbean and the rarefied aesthetics of Enya (among the artists listened to by Lido).

Half an hour of music and eight songs where dembow, cumbia and electronics intertwine with the backbone of his Afro-Colombian roots.

The album proceeds through peremptory acts of eviction, both on a private and geopolitical level. In Tóxica and TalentoPimienta liquidates the sentimental rubble without melodramatic postures, accompanying the intruder to the door demolishing the myth of the victim.

The conceptual turning point however comes with Tide: what opens as a balance of material claims (“Págame las uñas”) suddenly deviates into a decolonial invective that tears the “Isla Bonita” away from the Madonna-style imagination to return it to those who really live on that land (“Váyanse de mi playa, váyanse de mi isla bonita”).

The album also includes alliances with Nelly Furtado and Ana Macho, and the final refusal to go into exile No Me Quiero Ir,

“Caribenya” demonstrates that formal research does not need to wear the good dress of Western classical music.

In this sense, the Colombian-Canadian artist imposes himself in his own way as the further, necessary evolution of a South American culture. If Bad Bunny transformed the Caribbean into a global pop language, Pimienta reclaims its more ancestral and political side, shifting the focus of the discussion from cultural consumption to the memory of the territories.