Juana Molina - DOGA Review
A patient, dreamlike record that expands Juana Molina’s universe in subtle but striking ways.
It’s been eight long years since Juana Molina’s last full-length album; in that time the world has lurched through pandemics, political storms, climate chaos and an unnerving tech boom, yet Juana Molina’s sonic universe seems to exist solely to herself and has only become more refined since Halo. DOGA distils everything that makes Juana Molina’s work so distinctive, then pushes it further into her own private terrain. The record feels untraceable in its influences, built from drifting melodies, ghostly textures and small, intentional movements that unfold through repetition and restraint. Her harmonies sit in this beautifully austere place, shifting without ever drawing attention to themselves, while her lyrics layer and circle back like fragments of a dream. For longtime listeners, it’s a landscape they’ll recognise but still find full of surprises; for anyone new to her catalogue, it’s a striking invitation into a world only she could create.
DOGA traces its origins back to 2019, when Molina and keyboardist Odín Schwartz prepared a run of “Improviset” shows built entirely around spontaneous performance. Working largely with analog synths and sequencers, the pair documented everything, knowing the music would be impossible to recreate. Some of those improvisations became the seeds for DOGA.
The album opens with “uno es árbol,” a piece that works almost like a mantra, its looping phrases shifting in meaning as Molina toys with the tension between being rooted and coming loose. Her invented word desárbol, an “un-treeing”, suggests a soft unraveling of identity and sets the record’s meditative tone from the outset. From there, every track on DOGA sinks into a hypnotic, slightly uncanny groove, a rhythmic pull that feels delicate on the surface yet quietly disorienting just beneath it.
‘caravanas’ pairs its plucked strings with shifting, ghostly synths and Molina’s processed vocals, creating one of the album’s most quietly transportive moments. The lyrics read like a protective chant, calling on caravans to carry someone north, to warm them, hide them and heal their pain with penas de otros colores, sorrows of different shades. It feels like a ritual for care and safe passage, wrapped in a melody that hovers between comfort and unease.
Lead single “siestas ahí” carries a cutesy, almost lullaby-like charm, but there’s a deeper tenderness running beneath it. Molina’s lyrics circle intimacy and drift, singing about moving closer to another’s softness and dissolving in their presence until she’s left floating, light and dazed. As the song unfolds, those sentiments are mirrored in the arrangement: slinky guitars slide up and down like a gentle sway, while soft synth gurgles give the whole thing a dreamy, slightly jaded glow. It’s both sweet and quietly disorienting.
As the album moves into its second half, DOGA opens up even further, stretching Molina’s ideas across longer, slow-burning structures. ‘miro todo’ is the album’s first long descent into deep focus, a nine-minute piece that starts like a slow exhale before gradually tightening into something stranger and more forceful. Molina threads together jagged, crunchy guitar lines and reverbed vocals that feel half sung and half incanted, eventually letting a loose, proto folk-punk drum pattern nudge the track forward in its own crooked rhythm. The lyrics read like flickers of consciousness, moving from earthy, tactile actions to surreal images of martians, shadows and shining frogs. There is a sense of constant becoming in these lines, a cycle of growing, burning, doubting and glowing that mirrors the music’s patient unfolding. By the time the bassline starts to snake through the mix, ‘miro todo’ has shifted from meditation to invocation, a slow build that feels both rooted in the ground and lifted slightly above it.
The final nine-minute piece, ‘rina soi,’ pushes even further into abstraction. The song opens with hollow, almost watery synth tones that swell and drift like something forming in real time. Molina’s vocals arrive in a made-up language, processed and slightly distorted, giving the impression of a voice reaching through mist rather than delivering words. The track feels almost entirely improvised, carried by bleeps, broken arpeggios and vaporous textures that wobble at the edges. As it builds, a kind of chaotic choir forms out of those warped fragments, creating a sense of communal murmur inside an otherwise solitary space. It is one of the most meditative pieces on the record, and its deconstructed sprawl feels like a quiet summary of the album’s mood as a whole.
DOGA ultimately feels like both a continuation and a renewal, shaped by years of wandering through ideas until the right ones rose to the surface. It carries the spontaneity of its “Improviset” roots but turns that raw material into something focused, intimate and unmistakably hers. After eight years away from full-length work, Molina hasn’t returned with a reinvention so much as a deepening, a reminder that her music evolves on its own timeline. It’s patient, immersive and deeply idiosyncratic, the work of an artist shaping a world that never plays by anyone else’s logic but her own.
