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.