Marina Herlop

“If music were a stoplight—like, red, yellow, green—then I wanted to make it always yellow,” Spain’s Marina Herlop told Pitchfork in 2022, the day her album Pripyat was released. “I got interested in the feeling of not being able to relax when you’re listening. Always trying to change my harmonic progressions, trying to do something unexpected.” Indeed, the breakthrough Pripyat felt like a seven-round game of zigs and zags, with Herlop’s claustrophobic sense of rhythm and ebullient vocals in a language of her own design colliding with truly wild piano runs. It was exhilarating, an active listening experience whose 30-minute runtime made you want more. Indeed, she followed it a year later with Nekkuja, where harp glissandi and cascading breakbeats and heavy piano lines shaped a teeming world through which her voice could dart and leap, disappear and howl. Like Björk or Meredith Monk, Herlop’s music stems from a singular mind, focused and committed.

Though she played piano as a kid, Herlop headed to Barcelona to study journalism and science until she realized that, given the world’s grim economic prospects, that toil wasn’t worth it. She went to conservatory and released two records of solo piano pieces that reached very few. A committed student and self-described nerd, she hunkered down with Ableton Live, learning the presets and painstakingly building the songs that became Pripyat. Her 2026 album and, so far, her opus, Dja Dja, stemmed from the same staggering commitment—a three-year process of composing and recording, the seamless 50-minute work sketched out on a massive piece of cardboard. Exhilarating and wonderfully exhausting, these 15 tracks crosshatch classical composition and industrial rhythms, Carnatic singing and Reich-like repetition, grime aggression and Debussy delicacy. It is entirely unpredictable and self-made, the wealth of ideas flowing from a single mind that seems flooded with them. Dja Dja is one of the year’s masterpieces, made by a composer working with unrivaled levels of audacity or energy.