Juana Molina

Juana Molina is a singer/songwriter from Argentina whose atmospheric blend of folk, electronica, and experimental pop have brought her international acclaim. Her career trajectory has been a unique one with her initial success coming as a massively popular comedic actress in the early 1990s. The subsequent abandonment of her television career in 1996 flummoxed critics at home, where her newly launched music career failed to take hold. Nevertheless, Molina's inventive and original songwriting was widely accepted outside of Latin America where, over the next two decades, she established herself as a critically lauded recording and touring artist with albums like Un Dia (2008) and Halo (2017). Her success carried into the 2020s with the EP Exhalo.

The daughter of tango singer Horacio Molina and actress Elva "Chunchuna" Villafañe, Juana was immersed in the arts from a young age and began playing guitar at the age of five. She actually made her first recorded appearance as a child alongside her father in 1967, singing the song "Te regalo esta canción" as a Mother's Day gift to her mother. Her father secretly released it as a single and it became a hit, selling 45,000 copies. In the late '70s, her family fled to Paris for several years to escape the military dictatorship in Argentina. Her time in France would prove to be influential in her music. Although she considered music to be her initial focus, Molina was a natural performer with a gift for doing impressions. Beginning in the late '80s, she appeared in a series of sketch comedy shows before eventually starring in her own, Juana y sus hermanas, which became a major syndicated hit throughout South America in the early '90s. Within a few years she'd become Argentina's most popular comedian, even if music remained her first love. After taking a break from the show to give birth to her daughter, she chose to cancel her television show in 1994 and instead launch a music career.

In the face of much skepticism, Molina debuted in 1996 with Rara, which to fans of her comedy career seemed like just another celebrity vanity project. In spite of its high quality and originality, fans and critics in Argentina seemed unwilling to support her new career and she subsequently moved to Los Angeles. Honing her craft in a more supportive climate, she began experimenting with electronics, loops, and production, recording the tracks that would eventually make up her second album, Segundo. Released by U.K. label, Domino, in 2000, Segundo had all of the intimacy of Molina's earlier work, but the prominence of electronics on the album clearly signaled a departure. A critical success in Europe, Japan, and the U.S., it created demand for a third album, Tres Cosas, which appeared in 2004. The much more organic and acoustic guitar-based Son was released in May 2006 followed two years later by Un Dia, by which point, Molina had become a well-established and innovative musical artist around the world.

After a five-year break, Molina released Wed 21 in October of 2013 on Crammed Discs; it was self-produced at her home studio near Buenos Aires. Her seventh album, 2017's Halo, followed a similar pattern, but was party recorded in Texas at Sonic Ranch Studios. Hypnotic and inventive, Halo continued to straddle Molina's strange divide of off-kilter electronic pop and organic songwriting. During a subsequent performance at Denmark's Roskilde Festival, she and her band were forced to play a stripped-down, semi-improvised set when their equipment was lost by the airline. The show was a such a success that she applied a similar aesthetic to her next release, a 2019 EP of spiky, punk-inspired songs titled Forfun. Another EP, Exhalo, arrived in 2024 and featured unreleased material from the same sessions as Molina's 2017 album Halo. ~ TiVo Staff, Rovi