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Sweet Spirit’s music sounds like something you’d see high school kids slow-dancing to in an ’80s movie, but if you listen closely, their lyrics contain far more depth than any rom-com. The Austin-based sextet’s latest LP, Trinidad<\/em>, out last Friday via Merge Records, covers everything from rejection of social norms to “the loneliness of strangers who pass like ships in the night, unaware of their synchronicity,” as vocalist Sabrina Ellis puts it.<\/p>\n

The album spotlights Ellis’s Mexican heritage, both in its title \u2014 which is the name of their great grandmother \u2014 and in its single “Llorando,” the Spanish word for “crying.” The percussion in “Llorando” was even produced with bottles of Topo Chico, a mineral water brand sourced from Monterrey, Mexico. The song’s chorus was originally sung in Spanish just because it sounded better that way, but as Ellis witnessed increasing injustices toward Mexican immigrants by ICE, this choice of language became an act of rebellion and inclusivity.<\/p>\n

“Grief has had its way with me\/Grief has locked me up and thrown away the key,” Ellis sings in the synthy single, which was inspired by the grief people expressed in group therapy sessions Ellis used to go to \u2014 but was really about grief Ellis was afraid to feel.<\/p>\n

Grief is “easier to experience when packaged in a song,” Ellis explains \u2014 but there’s another benefit to processing it this way. “If I process an emotion, an experience, into a song, then someone hears it, keeps company with it and identifies with it, feels catharsis through it, that’s empathy. Once a song is made, it belongs to anyone who hears it. The emotional reverberation of a song is an empathy which defies time and space.”<\/p>\n