Cosa Nuestra: Capítulo 0

It’s rare these days for an album to be allowed to stand on its own. No matter how good a record is or how well-received, musicians can’t help but make sequels. The album is completely different but also still the album. Every eusexua has an afterglow. Though we are born to die, we are promised paradise. The same themes are mined, remixed, subverted, and marketed as a continuation until the album cycle lemon runs dry, bitter, or both.

Rauw Alejandro’s a particular fan of this framework. Real fans remember both slices of Trap Cake. He followed up magnum opus Saturno with Playa Saturno, a forehead kiss of an album tack-on. Cosa Nuestra’s “chapter zero,” billed as a prequel to last year’s album, is four songs shorter than the original 18-track LP. In other words, it’s a full album of its own, with a largely new sound and focus, even if it’s meant to exist in the cigar-perfumed universe Rauw has been wearing vintage suits in for over a year now.

Where Cosa Nuestra channeled salsa romántica greats, Capítulo 0 taps into syncretism, ancestry, and Puerto Rican folk sounds. This includes bomba, the Afro-Puertorican genre rooted firmly in the drum that forms the backbone of several tracks on Capítulo 0, including swoon-worthy opening track “Carita Linda,” rife with shakers and a call-and-response that feels like godly invocation.

Despite Cosa Nuestra’s aesthetic, salsa wasn’t quite in the room with us on that release; here, it is relegated to the album’s three-part finale. “Callejón de los Secretos,” with Chilean-Mexican musician Mon Laferte, is a high-class duet out of an old-school lounge. Energetic “FALSEDAD” sees Rauw decry a past love to congas and salsa horns with the heartbroken mastery of Frankie Ruiz (whose “Tú Con El,” a crucial cover from this era, Rauw nods to in the lyrics). Closer “Mirando Al Cielo” is an ode to Puerto Rico that evokes the mysticism coursing through Capítulo 0: “Mary is taking care of me/Yemayá is opening the seas,” he sings in Spanish, conjuring a divine protection that’s in line with salsa classics since the genre’s onset and closing the Cosa Nuestra era with his best vocals to date. That it feels a little late doesn’t lessen the impact, or execution.

The identity explorations become cringey when they’re too literal. Take “Caribeño”, a track engineered to make you feel empowered. Bronx rapper Saso of rock-reggaeton duo Planta Industrial opens the track, his roaring flow devouring the bomba drum behind him as he shouts out other Caribbean islands and several Orishas, praying the ancestors flow through the song. Suddenly, Rauw Alejandro rises out of the tide, comparing Caribbean men to ceiba trees, talking about the fire in Caribbean women’s hips, and paying lip service to years of anti-colonial struggle. The track deflates; what was a flamethrower powered by a key new voice turns into overwrought drivel that feels like a mango diaspora poem at best and promotion of the dated raza cósmica theory at worst. One regrets this wasn’t a Saso-only interlude.

Rauw’s sentimentality may not be convincing, but he hasn’t lost sight of his strong suit: raw sexuality. On “Silencio,” he turns the loverboy dramatics up to a hundred over a pristinely-done bachata with plinking strings and bongos, asking for a silent up-close dance and a night screaming in the bedroom. “Santa,” with producer Rvssian and Nigerian singer Ayra Starr, puts a lover on a pedestal over futuristic Afrobeat. “Contrabando,” a gleefully filthy perreo that samples “Maliante” by Sir Speedy and features Wisin and Ñengo Flow, reminds us that Rauw Alejandro’s sonic root—and one of the island’s biggest musical exports—is reggaeton, a genre he knows like the back of his hand. Put the playboy in a fitted two-piece and he’ll still dodge flying panties while dry-humping the air.

Capítulo 0 falls prey to a usual trap of today’s hitmakers: It feels like a collection of (well-crafted) singles rather than, well, an album. While it’s not super cohesive, it presents a suite of possibilities for Rauw’s future; if he chooses any one of these routes and runs straight in that direction—rather than indulging every side quest along the way—Cosa Nuestra’s prequel may mark the beginning of a wider exploration well worth his time. Ancestral reconnection, after all, is a longer process than an album follow-up.