With Spanish Leather, his second album, Guitarricadelafuente solidifies his place as one of Spain’s most compelling young voices, not by repeating the past, but by tearing it apart and stitching it back together. The record builds on the folk traditions that shaped his debut, but here, they’re a launchpad, not a resting place. The result is an album that feels both timeless and urgently modern, where the tension between old and new becomes its driving force.
At its core, Spanish Leather is about contradictions, sensuality and vulnerability, hedonism and longing, the thrill of freedom and the ache of rootlessness. Guitarricadelafuente writes with the vivid, unfiltered honesty of someone caught between youth and adulthood, between the village he came from and the world he’s stepping into. His lyrics paint scenes of love, doubt, and self-discovery, where fleeting pleasures crash against deeper searches for meaning. It’s an album about growing up, but also about what gets lost along the way.
Spain is everywhere in these songs, not just in sound, but in spirit. Place names like Puerta del Sol and Babieca (a defunct club where his parents met) anchor the music in real geography, while traditional melodies weave through modern production like a ghostly undercurrent. There are nods to the greats, Dylan, Mina, even a sample of Gino Paoli’s 1960 classic Il cielo in una stanza, but the voice is unmistakably his own: raw, poetic, and unafraid to blur the lines between folklore and contemporary pop.
The title Spanish Leather says it all. It’s tough yet sensual, weathered but alive, a metaphor for resilience, for the scars and softness of coming into your own. The music mirrors this duality, blending earthy acoustic textures with expansive, genre-defying production. A roster of collaborators – Carter Lang (SZA), pablopablo, Raül Refree, Jasper Harris (Camila Cabello, Lil Nas X), Brad Oberhofer, Rodaidh McDonald (The xx, Mustafa), Ciutat, Tristán and Teo Planell – helps shape a sound that’s as unpredictable as it is cohesive, moving from intimate balladry to widescreen experimentation.
You can listen to the full album HERE!
