El Guincho - Hiperasia (LP)

El Guincho’s third album arrived in 2016 like a neon-lit detour from the sun-drunk world of Alegranza and Pop Negro. Pablo Díaz-Reixa always had a crate-digger’s ear and a party-starter’s instincts, but Hiperasia turns those impulses inside out. The rhythms snap instead of lilt, melodies arrive in splinters, and Auto-Tune becomes a colouring tool rather than a crutch. It’s a joyfully synthetic record, restless and bristling, and it still feels like one of the more audacious pivots in Spanish pop this side of the last decade.

If you came for the balmy psych of Bombay, Hiperasia tells you early on to recalibrate. Beats hit with trap-like weight, hi-hats chatter, and samples pop in and out like fluorescent signage. The production has a clipped, percussive focus, yet it never loses El Guincho’s knack for earworms. Hooks don’t announce themselves with big choruses; they creep up as little chants and fragments, the sort of bits you find yourself muttering while boiling pasta. It’s the sound of a producer who has spent years chopping, re-pitching and reassembling, until even silence feels rhythmic.

Comix is the calling card and a minor classic in its own right, not least because of the jolt that Mala Rodríguez brings to the track. Her feature nails the record’s mood, tough and playful at once, with verses that dance on the knife-edge between street swagger and surrealism. The song also sums up Hiperasia’s palette: rubbery bass, busy percussion, synths that squeal like LED lights, vocals tuned into glassy contours. You can hear the studio work as musical arrangement, the way he frames voices and percussion like cut-up collage.

What keeps the record from feeling cold is Díaz-Reixa’s sense of mischief. Even when he leans into harsher textures, there’s a wink in the beat switches and a sly smile in the ad-libs. Spanish club currents thread through the set, from reggaeton’s dembow sway to lithe hip hop motifs. He’s not copying those styles so much as treating them as raw material, same as the samples he slices. That collage spirit has always been part of El Guincho’s world, but here it’s compressed into sharpened shapes. The songs are shorter, leaner, more hooked on the hit of a single idea.

A few years on, the record sounds prescient. Plenty of pop and indie artists have since chased a similar mix of abrasive beats and candy-bright melody, but Hiperasia lands with a peculiar mood that’s still hard to replicate. There’s a lived-in, street-market tactility to it, a sense of plastic, nylon and fluorescent light that undercuts any nostalgia for analog warmth. It’s not anti-vinyl by any stretch though. On wax, the low end has extra bounce and the transients snap in a way that flatters big speakers. If you’re hunting for El Guincho vinyl, keep an eye out because Hiperasia vinyl pressings don’t tend to gather dust. Folks who buy El Guincho records online will often tell you this one sells through quietly, then vanishes until the next batch shows up.

The videos around the album, driven by the Barcelona outfit CANADA, underscored the shift with a glossy, uncanny aesthetic that matched the sonics. It felt like El Guincho was rejecting easy exoticism and building his own futuristic city out of flashing signs and fragmented grooves. Critics clocked the move and were largely on board, noting how the record shed the beachy frames of earlier work for something spikier and more urban. That reception makes sense. This isn’t a background listen; it asks you to lean in and follow the edits, then rewards you when the percussion blooms or a chorus suddenly snaps into focus.

For fans of adventurous pop, Hiperasia is a keeper, the kind of album that pushes you out of old habits while still giving you something to hum. If you collect El Guincho albums on vinyl, it pairs beautifully with Pop Negro on the shelf, a left turn that makes the earlier record sound fresher by contrast. And if you’re crate-digging in a Melbourne record store, don’t be surprised if the staffer at the counter lights up when you ask about it. In the world of vinyl records Australia has a strong soft spot for shapeshifters, and this one has earned its cult stripes.