DOGA: Juana Molina’s Enchanted Labyrinth of Sound

Juana Molina’s music doesn’t so much linger in your head as it colonizes it, like some benevolent, brain-eating fungus. After first captivating audiences as the star of the Argentinian sketch comedy Juana y Sus Hermanas, Molina has spent nearly three decades transforming South American folk traditions into sprawling, rhizomatic networks where acoustic instrumentation collides with digital abstraction. Her early acting informs every loop and vocal flourish—imparting a human warmth to music that could easily feel alien. Even in her most haunting moments, a sly humor peers out: morbid but never morose, like a Gorey drawing brought to life. On 2017’s Halo, she refracted heartbreak through visions of potions, poisoned apples, and anthropomorphic femurs. With DOGA, her eighth album and first in eight years, Molina’s darkly comedic sensibilities remain, but they’ve evolved into a series of morality plays with no clear morals, slipperier and more revealing than anything she’s done before.

Recorded between 2019 and 2024 across improvisatory sessions with keyboardist Odín Schwartz, DOGA spans 30 hours of material pared down to a taut 55 minutes by producer Marito. Yet the sense of sprawl persists. On the churning opening track, “uno es árbol,” there is little to latch onto beyond one of Molina’s signature, hypnotic basslines. The lyrics form a recursive puzzle: “One is tree / One is not sleeping tree / In untree / One is asleep / The untree / In untree / One is not sleeping tree.” What is an “untree”? Perhaps it’s a perfect metaphor for her music: a presence that is simultaneously absent.

The album’s latter half features two droning epics that showcase the full palette of Molina’s shadowy imagination. The MIDI lullaby “rina soi” feels like a domestic nightmare given life, while “miro todo” is a psychedelic odyssey so vivid it answers the question: what if Rebekah Del Rio fronted Led Zeppelin? Halo drew from Patagonian folk myths; DOGA turns its gaze to the paranatural. Synthetic textures emulate the eerie timbres of the natural world—coyotes, fisher cats, the hum of a wasp nest—while tracks like “desinhumano” transport the listener into myth. Here, Molina retells the tale of Sun Wukong: “The monkey strides with his eager heart to be immortal… Swiftly, the monkey learns, yet proudly he fails him / Uninhuman! / He will fall, he will fall.” The cruelty humans inflict on one another often eclipses the fears lurking in the shadows.

Molina’s life experience informs the album’s intimate theatricality. Pregnant in 1993, she left Juana y Sus Hermanas; later, she briefly moved to L.A. to pursue music. “intringulado”—a coined term for “a mess all tangled up”—tells the story of three sisters squabbling over a teapot inherited from their mother, a nod to Molina’s own family. Her knack for storytelling transforms everyday domesticity into the absurd and uncanny, and several tracks are written as play dialogue, turning the album into a form of experimental theater. In this sense, DOGA is Juana Molina starring as Juana Molina, a self-reflexive performance where the autobiographical is both present and irrelevant.

In DOGA, left turns are not digressions—they are the work’s foundation. Molina has never stayed in one place for long, and she still refuses to. This is music of subtle strangeness, where the familiar and the alien entwine, leaving listeners intoxicated by the smallest hints of narrative, melody, and mischief.