Isabella Lovestory’s reggaeton pop is a conduit for extreme desires

“I think Amor Hardcore is more French, like an Isabelle Huppert-type sarcastic therapist, you know,” Isabella Lovestory says over zoom, comparing her upcoming album’s extreme nature to the protagonist of Michael Haneke’s 2001 film, The Piano Teacher. “I always go back and forth into really dark and extreme and vulgar worlds… or really fantastical, whimsical, gorgeous, arabesque type worlds. I think I’m in the middle of that.” 

This oscillation between poles is perhaps what best defines the 28-year-old Honduran reggaeton popstar, whose encyclopedic set of influences and personal style exceed any single aesthetic. Born Isabella Rodriguez Rivera and raised in Tegucigalpa by two quintessentially cool parents (her mother an architect and her father a radio host who introduced alt rock to Honduran listeners), she moved to suburban Virginia in her teenage years before relocating to Montreal to study visual art at Concordia University. “All my teachers hated me because I was a rebel, a bad student,” Isabella says. “I hate being told what to do with my art, which is literally all that art school is.”

Her disdain for artistic constraint is precisely what she loves about music — it allows her to redirect her creative impulses into an array of outputs. Her persona is strung across multiple media, her fingerprints most evidently marking the glossy sexiness of her music videos (which she directs and edits), their embrace of temporal haste and digital manipulation perfectly suited to her ever-shifting alter-ego. And while she may no longer have the cubicle studio that art school students are so familiar with, she now has the world as her classroom, deploying herself across cities and otherworldly realms. As she exists in the skin of Isabella Lovestory, she learns about her own person as much as she does her persona. “I mean I am Isabella Lovestory — it’s me, definitely — but I feel like you learn about yourself as you explore your art deeper, and as I’m fairly new in music. I’m learning and exploring as I go; learning about what I can be and what I can do,” Isabella explains. “I’m going deeper into the universe of Isabella Lovestory, or the planet. I’m discovering new rocks and flowers.”

Recently it seems that Isabella has found herself in a whole field of flowers. In the years since her debut single, “gati lindo precious” (an ode to her cat), she’s released two EPs, a remix album, recorded features on Erika de Casier’s The Sensational Remixes album and Mura Masa’s brand new Demon Time, and even played on the same bill as Chelsea Manning at Elsewhere. Yet, it’s on her upcoming album Amor Hardcore, out October 5, that Isabella fully comes into her sound. Produced by Isabella, longtime collaborator Chicken, and her boyfriend, the experimental reggaeton artist Kamixlo (along with production features from Nick León and Uli K), Amor Hardcore is the unofficial 11-track orientation to her unruly world. 

The four singles released ahead of the album alone account for some of the artist’s most wicked and extreme desires. “Cherry Bomb” oozes an explosive eroticism, the pounding drums augmenting Isabella’s voice as she surveys the vacillating margins of a wild sexual encounter. She kicks it up a notch in “Sexo Amor Dinero”, demanding to fulfil her sadomasochistic desires of hardcore sex, love and money with the cool and calculated fervour of Erika Kohut’s written list of desires in The Piano Teacher. In “Fashion Freak”, she converts any and all horniness into a fashion fetish. Isabella’s echo-y, subaquatic modulated voice interpolates the track, amid the buzzing drones and whistle tones.

Being a freak for fashion should come as no surprise, as the No Agency-signed model is equally known for her style. Whether singing about the Miu Miu kitten heels she purchased on eBay in her 2020 single “Kitten Heel” or her pervading fashion mania in “Fashion Freak”, Isabella isn’t afraid to call out those trying to steal her style. She also knows what she hates, noting that “so many” trends have been boring her recently — especially the ubiquity of Y2K. “I just hate when people start dressing like everybody else,” she says. She feels the same about indie sleaze, about its contrived upsurge in the trend cycle: “I just hate when things become a thing and are named, and the mystery and beauty are taken out of it.” 

Isabella may be bored by much of what she’s seeing right now, but she continues to find excitement in fantasy, performance and play. Perhaps that’s why Paradise Kiss so inspires her, an Ai Yazawa josei manga following a teenage Yukari “Caroline” Hayasaka, who finds herself infiltrating a fashion school and atelier full of sexy, androgynous, occasionally sadomasochistic men. An alluring world equally defined by performativity and girly, goth and punk aesthetics, it isn’t coincidental that Isabella’s style follows suit. She shares that she’s been into dressing “ultra, ultra girly” largely because her boyfriend Kami (Kamixlo) is “really goth”. “I feel like I’m cosplaying a girl in a way, to contrast my boyfriend,” she says. “So we look really weird together.” 

Though she may have a proclivity for cosplay, world-building and endless fantasy, Isabella’s worlds are still heavily rooted in the material world. Produced during COVID, Amor Hardcore entailed a more arduous process than her previous projects. Unable to get a visa to travel to the States, she had to resort to the internet — where she originally met Chicken — to produce the album.

A flight from lonely and solitary times, it’s only appropriate that Amor Hardcore is multivalent in its study of (and experimentation with) genre, influences and multidimensional worlds. The “escapist fantasy project” may be “very psychedelic and out of touch with reality,” but it still focuses on the most earthly of elements: sex, love and money. Incorporating reggaeton-pop with industrial-sized beats and a club mentality, Isabella wanted Amor Hardcore to be relatively incohesive. Much like K-Pop, which she lovingly describes as being “Frankenstein-ian” due to the way songs are constructed across somewhat fragmentary parts, Amor Hardcore creates a structure out of its disparate elements. This is especially evident in the opening track, “Amor Intro”, which samples song snippets from across the album, transforming them into an up-tempo club track that one can imagine hearing as a soundtrack to the hazy morning-after recollection of a sweaty, lustful night out.

Who knows what worlds Isabella will take us to next. Any attempt to pin her down is to ignore not only her fanciful imagination but also her expressed hate of being defined. In our conversation, she mentions that she listened to lots of Duster and shoegaze during the tail end of Amor Hardcore production, which led her to record two shoegaze songs — one of which she almost included on the album. She also mentioned a few artists she would like to collaborate with, including the Puerto Rican reggaeton duo Plan B and artist Ñengo Flow. Maybe she’ll even record with one of her favourite K-Pop groups: New Jeans, Stacy or TWICE. 

After all, if anyone is audacious enough to pack K-Pop, reggaeton and shoegaze into one album, it’s Isabella. “I have no limitations… I just make what I love,” she says. “This is the start of Isabella Lovestory and the doors have just opened to my beautiful castle and you’ve only seen the outside of it so far. And I know it’s really beautiful outside but inside there’s many, many things; many rooms to be explored.”

Credits

Photography Devon Corman