Titanic – Hagen
Titanic‘s Mabe Fratti said last year about her musical partner Hector Tosta, aka i.la católica, “I feel very trusting about his imagination… sometimes I’m very surprised by his ideas, and vice versa.” The two artists—who are also partners outside of their music—have worked together on no fewer than a half-dozen albums, making their debut as Titanic with the noir-jazz-tinged avant garde pop of 2023’s Vidrio, and the next year bringing that sense of imaginative genre fluidity to Fratti’s Sentir que no sabes. And each time the duo emerge from the studio, the shape and color of their musical approach seems to have transformed—that sense of imagination and surprise given the freedom to flourish and run wild. It’s not always a seamless partnership—”sometimes there’s ideas that he would love and I’m like ‘no, no, no.’ And he’s like, ‘yes, yes. yes,'” Fratti also said—but whatever chaos they harness is an inspired one, producing something beautiful and strange from that constructive tension.
Titanic harness that chaos into an even bigger bang on Hagen, their sophomore album as a duo. In fact, everything is bigger for the Mexico City duo this time around, from the eruptive sounds that come booming out of highlights such as leadoff track “Lágrima del Sol” or the percussive intensity of “Gotera” to the expanded field of sounds they draw from. It’s as much a beautifully bizarre pop album as it is a series of playfully abstract expressions, and as they see their horizons continue to unfold, they in turn make the distance between pop and avant garde seem a lot less vast.
The emphasis on pop is most palpable on “Lágrima del Sol,” but Titanic don’t offer up those hooks so easily; amid a crash of what sounds like harpsichord and abrasive intervals of strings, Fratti offers an instantly infectious vocal melody that almost seems to be fighting with the sonic minefield around her. It’s not until 90 seconds in that everything finally coalesces, a gorgeous immediacy that arrives, paradoxically, only after Fratti and Tosta make us wait for it. It’s all part of the shape-shifting nature of their music, wherein a wide-open prog pop sprawl finds a funk groove on “Escarbo dimensiones,” metallic, muted strings form the framework of a junkyard tropicália on “Gallina degollada,” and a hypnotic rhythm makes way for bright flashes of synthesizer in “Libra.” Yet even when the path toward the duo’s most glorious hook-laden climaxes is well-lit and relatively free of trapdoors, as on the power ballad in miniature “Te tragraste el chicle” or the art pop grandeur of “La trampa sale,” it’s still an absolute joy to hear them make the journey.
Fratti and Tosta only occasionally let an outside collaborator into their singular sound world, but when it happens, they unlock added dimensions to an already seemingly limitless approach. Eli Keszler’s intense percussive clatter lends a harshness beneath Fratti’s serene meditations on a hull breach (“nadia encuentra la gotera,” she sings: “nobody knows where the leak is”), and he pounds away beneath an even noisier and more distorted middle section in which Fratti’s cello becomes indistinguishable from a cacophonous guitar scrape. The duo also invite Oneohtrix Point Never’s Daniel Lopatin into their haunting chamber pop on “Pájaro de fuego,” his dreamy synth tones making cloudlike spirals around Fratti’s cello.
Even though the duo’s arrangements remained relatively minimal on Vidrio, Titanic never sounded limited in any way. Hagen sees that limitlessness flourish in even more unexpected ways, projecting an even brighter and more maximalist vision of pop wrought from a joyful kind of discord. The closer a glimpse we get of the collective imagination between these two musicians, the more brilliant the surprises that come to life.
Label: Tin Angel/Unheard of Hope
Year: 2025
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