RUSOWSKY - Daisy

Setting aside a handful of unstoppable international hits (sombr, Alex Warren, our own Damiano David, Sabrina Carpenter) and the national megastars Aitana and Dani Fernandez, Spain's top 40 of 2025 is a jungle of butts, short skirts, barely-veiled anthems to sexual predation (the scandalous “La Morocha” by Luck Ra), autotune à-la Bad Bunny, and countless flat intersections between urban and latin – the merengueton is perhaps the most terrifying of these Frankenstein hybrids.

There is, however, a white crow in this mass of sweat and phony beats: Rusowsky's “malibU”. Though built from the same latin-urban material, the song by the artist from Valladolid seems to come from another universe entirely. The latin urban beats, the reggaetón cadence, and the trap languor are here transfigured, dazed, floating in a cotton-candy atmosphere, in a dimension where sweetness and torpor reign supreme.

The most important news is that the enchantment isn't confined to the aforementioned single, but lasts for the entire length of this debut, with its cover of a monkey set against a flashy yellow background. The news within the news is that the Daisy of the title isn't an ass to be sniffed out and chased from the dancehall floor to the bed, but rather a creature idealized and romanticized by the rapper of Belarusian descent, in a manner somewhere between post-modernism and stilnovo.

And so the digital caresses of the synths, the slowed-down beats, the muffled autotune and the gentle chimes of piano that make up the tender backbone of tracks like "SOPHIA" and "BBY ROMEO" become the stage for dreamed-of kisses, sighs and post-adolescent insecurities. Along the same lines, but perhaps even more tender and confessional, "ALTAGAMA" practically begs you to reach for the term bedroom pop.

Livelier episodes like "Johhny Glamour", complete with house-style pianola and a guest spot from Las Ketchup (?!), and the little dance whirlwind of "pink+pink" add imagination to an album that's livelier than you'd expect once you surrender to its slow, sticky mood. Rusowski does allow himself one slip-up, though, and it costs him half a point, when he invites La Zowi for a "sukkKK!!" in which the refined guest rattles the speakers and makes ears bleed amid a flurry of "papi chulo y rapperos que le comen nel chocho (pimps and rappers who eat her pussy)".

It's a minor flaw, mitigated by the playful spirit behind it, in an album that reinvents Latin urban in the name of sweetness and honey, as well as one of the pop records of the year so far.

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02/10/2025