The artist is exactly what the world needs now – and, thankfully, she’s everywhere
KALI UCHIS IS IN LOVE. THIS MAKES SENSE: the 28-year-old’s music has always been seductive or, shall we say, vibey, gliding effortlessly between soul, bossa nova, reggaeton and groove. (Put another way, hers are the kind of songs you can imagine kids in 16 or so years learning that they were conceived to.) You likely know Telepatía, even if you don’t know that you know it. The earworm has been played on Spotify more than 800,000,000 times at last count. When it bounced Bad Bunny and Jhay Cortez’s Dákiti from the top of Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart in 2021, it was the first time a song by a female soloist without an accompanying act had claimed the number one spot in nearly a decade. Uchis’s newest album, the sultry Red Moon in Venus, arrives this month, snippets from which are guaranteed to take over your TikTok feed if they haven’t already. (Hasta Cuando has a spoken-word chorus about dealing with jealous rivals that’s prime material for creators to mug along to.)
But back to the warm fuzzies. When we connect, Uchis has just returned from a trip to Australia with her boyfriend and occasional musical partner, the rapper Don Toliver, who was touring there. ‘I feel like it’s a beautiful thing to travel the world with somebody you love,’ she tells me. ‘He comes on my tours, and I go on his. That’s how we figured out how to do our lives.’
Born Karly-Marina Loaiza, Uchis grew up between Pereira, Colombia, and the suburbs of northern Virginia, USA, as the youngest of five children. Pop stardom was certainly not a given. ‘I always loved music, I always loved making things, and I knew in general that my purpose was to create,’ she says, ‘but I never ever thought that I would be a singer.’ She was a saxophonist in her high-school’s jazz band. ‘My older brother played saxophone, so it was in the house already,’ she says with a laugh. ‘I wanted to play violin, but my parents weren’t about to rent a whole other instrument. I ended up loving it, though.’ She also wrote poems, which she turned into lyrics. ‘When I was really little, I liked attention. I was the kid who was always like, “Look at me – look, I
