Before the Puerto Rican duo Buscabulla made their new album Se Amaba Así, they’d gone through a whirlwind period of ups and downs. Back in 2020, they released their breakthrough LP Regresa, a gorgeous rumination of life in their native Puerto Rico, where they moved in 2017 from New York. Regresa was met with tons of critical acclaim and attention — and then the world shut down.
Buscabulla, made up of artistic and romantic partners Luis Alfredo Del Valle and Raquel Berrios, who have been together for a decade, managed to do a lot during the pandemic, releasing stunning videos and visual concepts for Regresa. But the fact that they couldn’t go out and tour the record made their career progress really difficult. “We felt this lull of not being able to promote the album and we were hitting a weird point of, ‘Damn, we have to make another project now,’” Berrios explains. “But we hadn’t seen any sort of substantial gains because it was the whole pandemic. Luis and I were feeling like, ‘Are we going to have to do something else?’ Things were so bleak.”
“You put so much work into a record and then it comes out in this the weirdest environment,” Del Valle adds. “And then, like, a year goes by and you’re still kind of in your house. So it was like, ‘I don’t know, maybe we gotta try something else.’”
However, in April 2021, right on Easter, they got an unexpected call: It was Bad Bunny. “I always tell the story, like ‘The Bunny called on Easter Sunday,’” Berrios says with a laugh. “What’s wild is that he said, ‘You know, all I did was listen to your record while I was like an isolation.’” Bad Bunny shared that Regresa had touched him deeply, and eventually, he asked the duo join him on a song called “Andrea,” from his record-breaking album Un Verano Sin Ti. So much of the dreamy track, about a woman finding her own autonomy in Puerto Rico, gets its breeziness from Berrios’ hushed vocals, and it struck a chord at a time when the island has grappled with femicides and violence against women. “Andrea” became an emotional favorite on Un Verano Sin Ti, and it currently has 550 million streams on Spotify. The gates crashed open for Buscabulla.
“All of a sudden, this explosion came,” Berrios recalls. “We got the opportunity to really play, and we played everywhere: We did a U.S. tour, we played in Colombia, we did a lot.” Yet all of it — the rollercoaster highs and lows, the touring, the hectic boom-and-bust cycles of music — began tugging at the seams of their tight-knit partnership. “I think that with a lot of the craziness that was happening, Luis and I were all also feeling it in our own relationship. I mean, we’ve been doing this now for more than 10 years, our band and being in a relationship. And it was just a lot. It really took a toll on us, and we just decided to write about it.”
What started pouring out became Se Amaba Así, a profoundly personal portrait of their romance and their relationship as artists, partners, and parents. (They have an 11-year-old daughter together.) It’s far more intense and intimate than any of Buscabulla’s past work, while still remaining sonically adventurous and unexpected. “It’s a record about us,” Del Valle says. “It’s a record about our struggles as people to stay together. And it’s one of these things where you have all this anxiety because you’re really putting yourself on the line in a very real way.”
Berrios was interested in looking at all the ways love and connection have morphed in today, with constant distractions and digital overload. “We live in a post-romantic era — I think it’s the overflow of information and everything being so transparent that has sort of killed mystery and the danger of love and romance,” she says. To really interrogate love today, the band went back in time to examine these concepts over the generations. “In our album, we really look at our own history, our parents, our culture, and the sort of conditioning of how romance works in Puerto Rico and in Latin America.” That shaped a sonic tapestry that defies specific genres or time periods. Songs like “Mi Marido” and the title track “Se Amaba Así” capture the high-drama and theatrics of past balladeers in Latin music history without ever feeling obvious. (Berrios shares that the over-the-top Eighties brother-sister duo Pimpinela was a major inspiration.) “Te Fuiste,” with its skittering electronic spirit, and “El Camino,” the first single that stews and slowly builds, are refreshingly modern and hard to pin down.
At one point, the band considered making Se Amaba Así a two-sided LP, with six songs chronicling Del Valle’s experiences and six songs detailing Berrios’. Del Valle shied away from the idea a bit: “I was like, ‘I don’t want to have a couple’s argument on the record!” he says with a laugh. The project ended up being much more of a seamless conversation, but still full of moments of open-hearted vulnerability that focus on each perspective. On “El Empuje,” for example, Del Valle moves into the forefront, stepping from his usual position as a producer and instrumentalist to take the mic. Through aching vocals, he sings about the push-and-pull in the relationship, describing acute pain: “With all your anger and all your wounds, You want to suffer and make me suffer.”
Del Valle admits it wasn’t easy to put it all out there. “I felt that hesitation, for sure, because at least on my end, I don’t feel like I’ve exposed myself in that way before,” he explains. “But I admire artists who are honest, and I have to give credit to Raquel, because she was ballsy enough to say, ‘Let’s do this.’” Berrios remembers being floored by “El Empuje”: “It’s saying, ‘This is hard. I can’t take the push.’ And I’m here sort of witnessing what he’s going through,” she says. “I love that song so much, and it stings, but at the same time, I’m like, ‘Man you wrote a really good song.’”
Ultimately, the process of so much honesty, exposure, and bloodletting in front of the world led to catharsis, even as Buscabulla navigates what’s next for them. But what they hope is that Se Amaba Así opens a conversation for people grappling with their own complex feelings and understandings of love and connection. “When I think about this record, at first, I was like, ‘Why are you going to be so risky? And why do you want to talk about something so intimate?’” Berrios says. “But then I felt like, ‘Maybe we can help people.’ Maybe it’s through our own experience that people can really see themselves. The focus of this record is really kind of healing — and I hope people really reflect on how they love.”