Pedrito Martinez opens up his heart to us and gives his most intimate and vulnerable performance yet in the new single “Avenida Malecon,” the latest cut out of the pop underground to get a lot of attention from critics across the board this month. In this song, rigid textures are flanked with fluid transparency in the lyrics that makes it easy for listeners to attach themselves both emotionally and physically to the content of the material; in the place of swaggering hooks, we instead find undersized swing steps in the chorus that take us backward in time, to an era in Latin pop music history that favored boisterous melodies over sweeping lyrical rhyming.
The style of attack might be steeped in tradition, but this master mix is planted in the future of modern pop; around every twist and turn in the rhythm, we’re treated to a spectacle of sonic wonderment that is never tethered to one group of instrumental fireworks over another. “Avenida Malecon” is the danceable, colorful symphony that this year needed to get started on the right foot, and it lives up to the high standard that the Latin pop of yore set long ago.
It’s hard to write a review about this song without highlighting all that unvarnished swing that spikes the chorus with just enough adrenaline to push us over the blunt tone of the main verses, which is why I won’t even attempt to. Even with all of the time and energy that was put into the music video for the track, our attention is constantly drawn back towards the versatile, charming beats that punctuate the undying emotion in Martinez’s voice when he lets everything go at the climax through the song.
The video puts some slick polish on top of what can only be described as a raw, relentlessly physical Latin pop bruiser that doesn’t want to fit in with the passive crowd in the genre and makes it all the easier for us to get these bittersweet verses stuck in our head by feeding them to us in real-time. No matter what sort of emotional state you’re in, “Avenida Malecon” seems to be determined to get us into the convertible beside this tuneful crooner, and when he’s describing the adventure at hand, it’s hard to resist what he’s putting on the table before us.
I don’t think that it’s a stretch to say that “Avenida Malecon” is among the most vivacious Latin pop songs that we’ve heard from the underground so far in 2023, and that’s coming from a critic who has heard more than their fair share of bittersweet bucolic singles in the last month. Pedrito Martinez doesn’t shortcut audiences in anything that they release, and while this track is pretty simple structurally, its melodies are the antithesis of what Gen Z would define as ordinary. Martinez is pushing the envelope as far as he can both in and outside of the studio, and with “Avenida Malecon,” he solidifies his status as one of the premier modern Latin pop songwriters in his scene today.