“Curandera” opens Bestiaria with a healer giving instructions. “Niña / Escucha cómo tu cuerpo te habla,” sings Ana Karen G. Barajas of Karen y Los Remedios: girl, listen to how your body talks to you. The song comes from Karen’s own illness and from the women in her family who saw her through it with advice, recipes and limpias, the cleansing rituals Mexican grandmothers pass down. The curandera in the lyric hands the work back to the girl, telling her to listen to her body and to how her soul breathes, and warns her that “Cuando callas te guardas / Lo malo / Y lo bueno”: stay silent and you keep the bad in with the good.

Karen, guitarist Guillermo Berbeyer and Mexico City producer Jiony set it as a dark cumbia over a low bass and a steady beat. Trombone and cowbell sit around her voice, an organ hangs at the back of the mix, and in the instrumental breaks synth and guitar lines take over.

She lives in Hong Kong now, a long way from the Mexico City she was born in and the Guanajuato she grew up in. Bestiaria, the follow-up to 2023’s Silencio, builds its twelve songs around twelve figures, among them the agave goddess Mayahuel and the Fates of “Las Moiras”. “Curandera” is the fourth single from it.

Listen to “Curandera” HERE and pre-order Bestiaria, out on 9 October via ZZK Records, following THIS LINK