

and their ‘better for you’ canned drinks.

Multiple brands will also be popping up at stalls around Hyde Park for the festival – we’ll be making a beeline for Miami Cocktail Co. They certainly haven’t held back with the lineup last year – Adele, Elton John and even the bloody Rolling Stones were on the bill – and this year has already seen iconic rock band Guns N’Roses jump on board the bill. Both albums shaped an adventurous year that left us hopeful for more music with a vision.🎶 Why BST Hyde Park: London’s largest Royal park hosts music royalty in six open-air concerts across two weekends (with free midweek entertainment) to make for an event like no other. Tangana’s stunning, avant-garde opus El Madrileño, which is likely to stand up as one of the best Spanish-language musical recordings of the last decade, and Rauw Alejandro’s intrepid blockbuster Vice Versa, a daredevil’s blend of pop, house, and even bolero music that rocked commercial pop and reggaeton conventions, spawned off mega-hits like “Todo De Ti” that defined the summer, and blasted him into global stardom. The two albums that perhaps best embodied 2021’s wayfaring sonic experiments were C. Entusiasmo, celebrated the euphoria of hitting the dancefloor again after lockdown. Others, such as the honey-voiced Panamanian singer Sech on 42 and the Chilean indie icon Javiera Mena on I. There were albums guided by introspection and depth, such as the Colombian multi-hyphenate Mabiland’s gorgeous LP Niñxs Rotxs, the Mexican singer-songwriter Ed Maverick’s self-reflective Eduardo, and the Nicaraguan-Canadian electronic artist Mas Aya’s Máscaras, a meditation on people fighting oppression over the decades. The Colombian bullerengue treasure Petrona Martinez put African roots front and center on her Latin Grammy-winning Ancestras, while the Mexican singer Natalia Lafourcade continued her quest to bring Mexico’s musical history into the present day on Un Canto Por México, Vol 2.

Such a sense of enthusiasm and inventiveness led to wide-ranging projects, many of which distilled traditions, broke genre rules, and landed powerful fusions that pushed unflinchingly into the future. After we spent most of last year confined at home during a crushing pandemic, artists across the Spanish-speaking world approached 2021 with a voracious sense of creativity, their imaginations gushing out with the force of a burst pipe.
