Alone, Together with Lisbon Girls
Lisbon Girls sell heartache. The band signals its mission by taking their name from the sisters who gave Jeffrey Eugenides’ book The Virgin Suicides its title, but you don’t need to know that. Singer Pilar’s breathy, half-private delivery conveys the kind of glamorous, consuming heartache that one could fall in love with. The words are in Spanish, but that’s no obstacle. Even in the sunnier moments, she sings as if rain is inevitable.
Their heartache isn’t a lonely, introspective, journals-come-to-life kind of heartache. It’s crying on the inside because you’re in a club. The bass and drums mark Lisbon Girls’ clearly as dance music, and “El Antídoto” from 2024’s Te Love You comes from the chill-out time early in the morning when people are pairing off and the one she wants just left with someone else. Maybe never even noticed she was there. That might not be the story the actual lyrics tell, but it could be.
The loveliness of the songs themselves makes it easy to return to Lisbon Girls, though. The clouds break for the uptempo “Me Robas La Calma,” where Pilar sings (in a brief moment of English), “I’m so into you / tell me you’re still into me too.” The easy groove and the warmth in her voice make it possible for the song to slip by at least once or twice before “still” sneaks out of the line to serve as a possible cue that another relationship might be in trouble.
Lisbon Girls are three New Orleans-born siblings: Pilar, Lucho, and Nikolai (Nik). They come by their Latin roots via a father from Honduras and a mother from Ecuador who met in New Orleans. “They were high school sweethearts,” Pilar says.
The band started during the COVID lockdown when Lucho began writing songs solely in Spanish and realized he’d never done a Spanish language musical project before. He didn’t know where it would go at the time, but he thought it had enough going on that he asked Pilar and Nik if they wanted to join him.
Singing in Spanish made Lisbon Girls distinctive from other bands in New Orleans’ music community. The city has a number of Latin bands, but most play “Musica tipica,” Lucho says—music based in folk and traditional forms. That’s there in the background of Lisbon Girls’ songs he says, but “as individuals that enjoy pop music and have grown up on pop music—even Spanish pop music—we wanted to go into that avenue.”
They embrace their Latin culture, but by going in a pop direction, they’ve made it harder for audiences used to going out for a salsa night to connect with them. Pop audiences that don’t speak Spanish also face impediments since the lyrics don’t tell them the story or how to respond.
Pilar’s performances address that issue with the obvious intimacy she conveys. “I want the audience to feel that closeness,” she says, and as best as she can tell, they often do. She tries not to watch the crowd too much because that can distract her, but “they’re there with their eyes closed, just by themselves,” she says. “Like, if they were in their room, just standing alone, listening to the music. And I really enjoy that because that’s what I want them to feel.”
In a way, singing in a language many fans don’t speak makes that easier. Lyrics work in two directions as they nail down what a story is and what it isn’t. For people who don’t speak Spanish, the lyrics don’t pin the emotion in her voice to one specific situation. They’re free to hear her performance as lovely, lonely sound and connect it to situations that resonate with them.
“We’ve had people come up and be like, ‘Just listening to you guys, you have just given me peace,’ and that’s really cool to hear,” Pilar says. “As a musician, you do have that responsibility to lead them into something nice, or have them escape in that little moment.”
It’s easy to feel Lisbon Girls songs because there are few impediments along the way. Their vibe brings Sade to mind as the spare, almost ornament-free sound strips out everything but the most necessary elements. The heartache is almost unfiltered.
If there’s a secret sauce, it’s Japanese city pop—an urban, often opulent jazz/funk/R&B sound popular in the 1970s and ‘80s. It has a luxe quality that Lisbon Girls share. Lucho came to it specifically through 1984’s “Plastic Love” by Mariya Takeuchi.
“It’s the song, right?” Lucho asks. “It’s the song that everyone immediately gets introduced to,” but since they grew up watching anime, Asian music has long been an influence. What they didn’t discover on their own, friends who also loved anime shared with them. “It could be the happiest music, but the most depressing lyrics,” Pilar says. “Or in an anime, something drastic happened to the protagonist, but here comes the city pop music at the end.”
When they played their first gig in 2021, Lisbon Girls weren’t sure how it was going to go over. They knew they’d picked an unconventional path by challenging English-speaking audiences to connect while offering Spanish-speaking audiences something they didn’t expect. They weren’t sure how or where they fit in. “That’s something we’re still trying to figure out,” Pilar says. “If we want to be an anomaly, that’s great too. There’s always room for an anomaly.”
Lisbon Girls closed 2025 with a new song, “Sin Título,” and has new music due out in early 2026. For more info, check out lisbongirls1.bandcamp.com.
Top photo by Amanda Zell: left to right: Lucho, Nikolai, Pilar
For more Alex Rawls musings, check out myspiltmilk.com and @myspiltmilk on socials.
