Making an album to dispel stereotypes, she found a lifeline

Lido Pimienta in Burlington, Ontario, Canada on July 13, 2026. On Pimienta’s new album, “Caribenya,” the Colombian Canadian musician sought a warmer, more complex depiction of Caribbean culture. Creating it helped her rediscover the beauty of living. (Tommy Keith/The New York Times)

By CAROLINA ABBOTT GALVÃO

Chinchorros, hammocks traditionally handwoven by the Wayuu Indigenous community, hang in many homes in La Guajira, the arid peninsula straddling Colombia and Venezuela where many of the group’s members live.

When Lido Pimienta, a Colombian Canadian musician, thinks about beauty, she tends to think about that object: how it feels to wake up cocooned in its netting, the geometric shapes the sun carves as its rays sneak through the hammock’s woven patterns and cast shadows on the floor.

“That’s kind of how I see life and color and music,” she said, wearing silver hoops and a dark top with embroidered sleeves that ballooned around her shoulders, in a video interview from her living room in London, Ontario.

The idea of beauty has always been central to Pimienta — who is of Afro-Colombian and Wayuu descent — and her work, which ranges across music, ceramics and textiles. Pimienta won the Polaris Music Prize, Canada’s top music award, for her second album, “La Papessa” (2016), but rose to more prominence in 2020 with “Miss Colombia,” a record that examined anti-Blackness, Eurocentric aesthetic norms and misogyny. She later described it as an angry love letter to her home country. Five years later, she put out “La Belleza,” Spanish for “the beauty,” a dembow-infused orchestral suite over nine tracks composed for the New York City Ballet, the company’s first score from a woman of color. Her latest album, “Caribenya,” builds on that work and then flips it on its head.

Initially conceived of as a B-side to her last release, the title combines the word “Caribbean” with Enya, the enigmatic Irish singer and composer. On it, Pimienta trades the Gregorian chants and dramatic string arrangements she played with on “La Belleza” for a warmer, poppier sound decidedly driven by cumbia. Images of dragonflies, rivers and the sea abound, as do depictions of fraught emotional relationships and critiques of colonialism. Beauty is a consideration, too, though there’s also something more complex at play.

“My whole ethos,” Pimienta said, is to showcase the “Caribbean sublime.”

In doing so, she hopes to dispel stereotypes about her homeland. Media depictions of the Caribbean tend to exoticize the region, but Pimienta wishes people would see it as “not decorative, not just where you go to relax or go wild,” but rather “a respectable place.”

The singer, visual artist and composer, now 38, spent most of her life in Barranquilla, a port city in northern Colombia, where the Magdalena River meets the Caribbean Sea. In her late teens, Pimienta moved to Ontario, where she began to see race and racism in a different light, she said. While she was teased and bullied in Colombia because of how she looked — in the private bilingual school her mom worked hard to put her in, she said, classmates would cut her Afro hair and place it under a microscope — it wasn’t the same as when a white Canadian would tell her to “go back” to “her country.” She got married at 19 and had a son at 21. When the marriage didn’t work out, Pimienta went to Toronto to study criticism and curatorial practice at the Ontario College of Art and Design.

Even after the success of “Miss Colombia,” which was nominated for a Grammy Award, Pimienta still struggled financially. When she began touring the record, things started to go wrong: She entered a dispute with a member of her team, and the deal on a house she was buying in Colombia fell through. On top of that, she said, “My father, who raised me, passed away, and I couldn’t be at the burial because I was on tour making money.”

For two years, she was clinically depressed, she said. At her lowest point, she got a call from choreographer Andrea Miller, who asked if Pimienta would be interested in collaborating on a piece for the New York City Ballet. Working on new music helped.

“I started recognizing beauty,” Pimienta said. “Why it’s worth living for, why it’s worth staying, why I’m still here.”

By the time “La Belleza” came out, Pimienta was already working on “Caribenya,” which was largely produced by Amigos Poderosos, Chancha Vía Circuito and the collective Grupo Jejeje, comprising Turbo Sonidero and Arrabalero. The Britain-based Arrabalero stayed with Pimienta during the last month of recording. One day they were in the studio with singer-songwriter Nelly Furtado, a friend of Pimienta’s, when they began talking about a song Pimienta was working on, “Hoy Por Tí,” a synthy, slow-burning cumbia. Furtado had always liked the track. When Pimienta suggested Furtado sing on it, she agreed. “As she was getting ready in the booth, I wrote the lyrics,” Pimienta said.

Her engagement with the non-Western canon often gets her records placed in the world music aisle, a label she pushes back on.

“‘World music’ is a term that Europeans created so that they would make themselves superior yet again,” Pimienta said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, she’s from Colombia; let’s put her with all the other countries lumped into one.’”

But Pimienta’s work — which is at times classical, pop, cumbia, electro-pop, reggaeton and folk — also evades genre altogether. In the end, she argued, what matters is quality.

“And great art always survives, you know, like when you listen to my music, you can listen to it in any year and it doesn’t sound dated,” she said. “It sounds like it belongs to the now, because it is music that is made with heart.”