Fit Check, Food Check: Helado Tropical on Cooking and Collaboration
Helado Negro and Reyna Tropical are your favorite artist’s favorite artists. For years, the genre-bending musicians — whose government names are Roberto Carlos Lange and Fabi Reyna — have received critical acclaim from the likes of NPR. Last week, they released a joint album under the name Helado Tropical. Take one listen, and you’ll wonder why they didn’t collaborate earlier. The duo’s measured vocals and wide-ranging sonic influences fuse effortlessly, producing a project you’ll want to dance and cry to in equal measure. Helado Tropical’s visual identity feels just as cohesive. The music video for their lead single, “Tocando,” was filmed in a grocery store, but still somehow makes sense. The video for their second single, “Soledad,” is a fever dream of colorful nostalgia.
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Helado Tropical joined us for tacos at GMC Temaxcal, a family-owned spot in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. We talked about life in the Latin American diaspora; Helado Negro is Ecuadorian-American, while Reyna Tropical is Mexico-born, Texas-raised. They joked like siblings as they revealed how they first met, why they joined forces, who takes the lead on their outfit choices, and which of the two is really the better cook.
Read on for our full conversation with Helado Negro and Reyna Tropical, and learn what makes Helado Tropical the perfect musical team.
Fit Check: How do you choose your outfits as Helado Tropical, rather than as individual artists?
Helado Negro: Fabi’s got a whole world that she’s built, visually. The way she looks is how she looks all the time. She’s always got the flyest outfits. One of the great things I experienced while working on this album, we sat down and collectively figured out some of the aesthetics. Fabi was like, “Alright, I got it. I’m going to make a moodboard.” So Fabi created all these looks, and through that, it was a consensus of, OK, this is the direction we’re going in. A lot of the group visual elements of our music videos and our live outfits, how we’re presenting ourselves for photography, have been Fabi’s vision.
Reyna Tropical: I feel like you’ve also been willing to try things. You’ve said no, and then you’re like, “OK, let’s try it.” And then you like it! That’s been the practice here. I’m like, let’s go crazy? What about this? What about this? It started off tropical, with the fruits in the grocery store, the blue Dickies. Now we’re in a psychedelic space in our minds together.
Food Check: Who’s the better cook?
RT: Oh, for sure Roberto.
HN: I had no choice! I remember my mom telling me that when she met my father, she didn’t know how to cook. She wasn’t raised to cook. She was like, “I’m going to school and doing my thing.” My dad knew how to cook, because he came from a completely different background, with a single mom. So my dad taught my mom some basic things, but then I learned from my mom. Maybe she learned from my dad, but she already had the gift.
How did Helado Tropical come to be?
HN: A friend of ours was just like, “Would you ever like to make a song together?” It was a friend from the label that released this album, Martin Anderson from Psychic Hotline. Fabi and I met at a party they were having at the studio before our session, and it was a complete blind-date situation in terms of us actually hanging out. It just became very easy to be around each other, quickly. It became easy to see that we would make music together.
RT: I knew that Roberto was just an icon. Who doesn’t like Helado Negro? That’s all I heard, ever. It really speaks to how great his music is, and his wearing his heart on his sleeve. I’m the same way. We’re two lovers who just love to love life. Also, that’s mixed in with some skepticism and a little bit of critical analysis at all times. You get it all here.
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How are your respective diasporic experiences present in this album?
RT: I didn’t know what version of me was going to come out with Roberto. Now that I think about it, the version that comes out of me no matter what is this longing for the beach, this longing for connection with water, with the sun and the way it makes my skin feel. I’m from la frontera, but I was born on Caribbean waters in Cancún. There’s a self-awareness when I’m able to be alone with the ocean, and in community with all those elements. And there’s the nighttime version of that, all the times I’ve made a fire on the beach.
HN: Listening to Fabi talk about water has been so interesting, because it’s something we didn’t talk about while recording. I’m a complete beach baby. That’s all I did my whole life. I was in the water, I was on swim teams. That’s what I am, a grain of sand sitting in the sun getting washed over by waves. I’m there all the time in my mind. I almost try not to think about it, because it hurts. I spent so much of my life in Salinas, Ecuador, on the beach in a place called La Libertad. We used to wake up, drink fresh-squeezed orange juice, eat a little bit of cheese, and walk to the beach. We’d have a coconut on the water and just hang out. And then growing up in South Florida, the vast diversity of people from different places, experiencing togetherness because of that. That’s what Fabi and I did in the studio: conviviendo in a sonic way.
How do you hope people feel when they listen to this album?
RT: I’m excited to see where people take this. That’s part of releasing music, that people take it into their own world. I learn so much about the music I make, that we make, and that we release through other people’s experiences. I want them to feel however it feels in the moment, and I want them to be present. I want this album to inspire presence, to inspire play and experimentation. That’s my hope.
HN: Something that Fabi and I share is a lot of what we want to see in the world. We both bring distinct things, and we both bring overlapping ideas. Something I’ve always wanted to see is someone like me out there. I think that’s what Fabi also wants to see. We center our world, the way we look, and our story. We don’t center anybody else. We want to make sure other people, when they’re telling their story through whichever art form, that they’re always centering their story. The second you start putting somebody else’s world, centering their story, you misalign your sincere and genuine vision, and you might not be your truest self in some respects.
Roberto, what makes Fabi a great collaborator?
HN: I think there’s an easy way to look at something that seems like a problem, especially in music. Fabi’s really good at being optimistic, being like, “Oh, let’s move on. Let’s try this.” It’s the confidence to know that everything is OK to move on from, to try, or to try repeating in a different way.
Fabi, what makes Roberto a great collaborator?
RT: If there’s a soundwave that’s around, Roberto finds it and goes really deep in it. He meticulously moves each wave, little bit by little bit. We go really deep for 30 minutes or an hour, and I like that because I can be pretty spontaneous, and I like to jump in and out of things pretty fast. With Roberto, I feel like I can surf that wave. It brings me into that hypnotizing movement.