Alejandra Cárdenas – ‘A Body Like a Home’ album review: A brutal sonic memoir
Alejandra Cárdenas’s new solo album, A Body Like a Home, is not for easy listening. Nor is it meant to be. Through 13 tracks, the Berlin-based Peruvian artist, known also as Ale Hop, acts as part-witness, part-confessor to life under a hopeless dictatorship, using the landscapes of her body as the ultimate form of resistance.
The Skinny: Ale Hop released her first solo album, The Life of Insects, in 2020. Following a string of acclaimed collaborations, including Mapambazuko alongside Congolese guitarist Titi Bakorta, the artist marks her most personal work to date by releasing the album under her birth name. No more hiding.
Think not of this project as an album, but more a sonic memoir, a diary come to life, fit with the startling observations and tangled realisations of the shockingly private made public.
The electronic musician and poet wields autobiographical soundscapes that, in her words, “Trace the inevitable loop between private wounds – addiction, domestic violence, fractured intimacy – and Peru’s national scars, carved by colonialism.”
At all times, Cárdenas is in conversation with her own voice, a voice that is consistently implicated in the language of Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship. Still, Cárdenas’s persistent prodding finds beauty in the cyclical legacies of colonialism, unearthing the disguised in a cathartic rush.
Cárdenas’s solution is to speak the language of the body to expose trauma, which, like a rotten tooth, is cellular, ritualistic, inherited, and insidious. The haunting violin of Mexican musician Gibrana Cervantes allows her thick spoken verse to oscillate between dark and light, brutal and tender.
This is undoubtedly the work of a multidisciplinary artist. The textured nature of ‘When We Were Diamonds’ sets like early dawn into the 11th titular track, interspersed with futuristic blips. Early on the record, ‘Glass Skin’ slips into ‘Early Road’, easing open a communicative channel into the long history of Peruvian folklore.
The Verdict: “‘What is the point of life?’ My mother cries. Then I cry too, because I have no answer,” Cárdenas recalls on ‘Motherland’. She may not have an answer, but Cárdenas shows us that ultimately, the greatest form of hope can lie in the hopelessness of it all.
Defining Track: ‘Motherland’
Release date: November 14th, 2025 | Label: Other People
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