RED MOON RISING

Musical phenomenon Kali Uchis is what the world needs now thankfully, she's everywhere.

- ALESSANDRA CODINHA

Kali Uchis is in love.

This tracks: The 28-year-old’s music has always been seductive, or, shall we say, vibey, gliding effortlessly between soul, bossa nova, reggaeton, and groove. (Put another way, hers are the kind of songs you can imagine kids in 16 or so years learning that they were conceived to.) You likely know “Telepatía,” even if you don’t know that you know it. The earworm has been played on Spotify more than 750,000,000 times at last count. When it bounced Bad Bunny and Jhay Cortez’s “Dákiti” from the top of Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart in 2021, it was the first time a song by a female soloist without an accompanying act had claimed the number one spot in nearly a decade. Uchis’s newest album, the sultry Red Moon in Venus, arrives this month, snippets from which are guaranteed to take over your TikTok feed if they haven’t already. (“Hasta Cuando” has a spoken-word chorus about dealing with jealous rivals that’s prime material for creators to mug along to.)

But back to the warm fuzzies—when we connect, Uchis has just returned from a trip to Australia with her boyfriend and occasional musical partner, rapper Don Toliver, who was touring there. “I feel like it’s a beautiful thing to travel the world with somebody you love,” Uchis tells me. “He comes on my tours, and I go on his. That’s how we figured out how to do our lives.”