Since the beginning, Isabel Ramírez has allowed rage to guide her songwriting. Five years ago, when her solo project La Muchacha began to take form, Ramírez looked inward for clues to the sound she sought to create. She realized she was angry. “I would ask myself, ‘Why do so many things bother me? Why does the news bother me so much?’” the Manizales, Colombia, native tells Remezcla over the phone.

These questions laid the groundwork for her first song “La Serpiente,” a reckoning with femininity, powered by her bellowing voice and the bass of beating drums. Sifting through her thoughts, she discovered an apt metaphor to describe her gender expression as she saw it—a serpent, but not the trickster kind described in the Bible. Rather, a serpent that could give life. “Everything started there,” Ramírez says. “That’s when I started singing about things that bother me and the sociopolitical reality in which we live.”

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