Buscabulla, the musical duo made up by Raquel Berrios and Luis Alfredo del Valle, partners in music and in life, has a uniquely atmospheric and textural pop sound that mixes electronic and Latin rhythms with lyrics grounded in Puerto Rican slang. Listening to their music, one crosses the threshold between the past, the present, and the future, constantly straddling fantasy and reality. And nowhere is that more evident than on their latest album, Se Amaba Así, where, over 12 songs, the pair have woven a masterful tale of amor and desamor—or loving and unloving.
On the first pair of singles, “Camino” and “Miraverahi,” Berrios alternatively sings of the sun setting on a road, leaving them wandering aimlessly through the dark, and asks her partner to “think about it and let me know how you’ll do if I leave and I never return.” Given the pair have been in a relationship for a long time (they also have a child together), and that they’d been sharing the album’s so-called “moodboard” on Instagram ahead of its release, which included old salsa and pop songs that talk about love with an all-consuming, all-or-nothing passion (what we would call corta venas), I had the impression that it was a concept album—like a telenovela set to music.
“El Camino” is the first single from Buscabulla’s second album.
“It’s actually the opposite,” says del Valle when I suggest as much at their record company’s offices in Brooklyn. “This is the most intimate thing we’ve ever written in our lives. We are talking about our relationship, our difficulties—our relationship as parents, as friends, as lovers.”
“It’s interesting that you see it that way, because it’s true that there is a narrative built in, but we wanted it to be more cinematic, to give it a touch of fantasy,” adds Berrios. “But it is a narrative based on our life.”
Their vulnerability shifts every theory I’d developed while listening to the album. While they’re certainly not the first couple to explore their relationship (beginning, middle, or end) while making music together, the reveal does feel like a tiny gut punch.
It’s not that they hadn’t borrowed from their life before; Regresa, their first full-length album after two critically acclaimed EPs, revolved around their decision to move back to Puerto Rico, where they both grew up, following years of living in New York City (where they actually met, almost a decade earlier). Released in May 2020, what was supposed to be a celebratory occasion was, of course, radically reframed by COVID. “Releasing a record during the pandemic was fairly wild.” Berrios recalls. “The truth is, I don’t have bad memories of the time because it was like a return to community in a way, but it was very hard for us professionally.” Unable to tour or properly promote the record, they got creative, like when they filmed an episode of NPR’s Tiny Desk from inside their car on the beach in Aguadilla (while the rest of the band played from their own house). They were finally able to go on the road in late 2021, and went back to the studio the following spring to work on new material. It was an uncertain moment. “We had no hope, no steam—and then Bad Bunny happened,” says Berrios.
”El Empuje” is one of the two songs del Valle sings on—a first for him.
The Puerto Rican superstar reached out to them to collaborate on a song, “Andrea,” undeniably one of the highlights of his record-breaking 2022 album, Un Verano Sin Ti. “It was such a reaffirming experience,” Berrios continues. “Imagine you put out a record, and two years later someone is like, ‘I want to tell the world who you guys are.’ It felt like a slap. Like, We have to keep making music. Everything is going to be okay.”
When they finally returned to the studio again in 2024, they did not set out to write so intimately about their relationship. “There was a moment when Raquel told me, ‘I think this record should be about us,’ and I was really hesitant at first because that’s never been the MO of the band,” says del Valle.“ But those were the songs that Raquel was writing.” As Berrios’s songwriting progressed, however, the couple realized they needed a counterweight—that his point of view was also necessary for the narrative of the album. “She really pushed me,” del Valle says.
The result was two bolero-esque ballads: “El Empuje,” on which he urges his lover to “hold on against the push that squeezes you and turns it upside down,” before deciding that maybe he’s the one who can no longer hold on; and “Mortal,” on which he sings, “I’m not made of iron, I’m a mortal man,” against a delicious ’80s guitar solo. They approached the writing honestly, but with extra care and respect given the world they’d be exploring. “It wasn’t easy, just like working on any record is never easy,” Berrios notes. “It was a bit like couples therapy, because we were just letting everything out—like, Let’s just go and leave everything on the table. And then afterwards we’d be like, ‘Not this, not this, not this…’”
“Se Amaba Así” featured vocals by the couple’s young daughter.
If anything, honesty is one of the record’s driving themes. “Se Amaba Asi,” (Spanish for “that’s how we used to love”), the song from which the album takes its name, arrives right in the middle of Se Amaba Así, and is also its narrative climax. “The song is from my point of view, but it’s also a reflection of my parents’ lives, how I saw them love each other, and how I do it as well,” Berrios explains. (Her father passed away a year before they started recording, and his influence—the music he listened to, the records he left behind—loomed large during the process.) In the song, she sings: “He was a rock, she was paper, always turning her back or her side; one day, tired, she left, and he stayed sitting there…. I don’t know why I didn’t cry, I guess I just got used to it and thought that’s how you loved.” While del Valle provides background vocals in the chorus, their daughter actually improvised the sweetly haunting melodies in the outro. “It’s a song that offers a lot of catharsis,” Berrios says. “In the beginning of the record there are a lot of complaints, [then] this is when everything—why things are the way they are—sort of clicks.”
The record’s richness thematically is matched by an especially expansive sound: “We wanted to give the songs a bit more gravity—violins, Spanish guitars, which we’d never explored before,” explains del Valle. Those instruments are mixed with their usual synth and electronic beats, influenced by the iconic Spanish band Mecano. On their album, however, “it’s a bit more maximalist, dramatic, like from a telenovela,” del Valle says. “We were thinking about música de trios; power ballads from the ’90s, like by Cristian Castro and Luis Miguel; real passionate songs. It’s interesting that people used to love with such abandon at some point, but that has been lost.” Well, Buscabulla is here to bring it all back; welcome to the summer of feeling things hardcore.
