Popscene x Rickshaw Stop Presents
GIRL ULTRA
el Tour de RRRomeo
Sunday, Feb 28, 2027
@ Rickshaw Stop
7pm doors, 8pm show
$22.00 advance, $25.00 week of show
All ages welcome
For years, Girl Ultra has treated genre like a passport. Each release has found the Mexico City artist
— born Mariana de Miguel — testing vast sonic dialects, discovering another way to tell the truth.
R&B may have introduced her to the world, yet experimental pop expanded the frame. But
RRROMEO, her latest full-length album, feels like something else entirely: a declaration of artistic
freedom wrapped in chrome-plated synths, late-night desire, and the kind of fearless songwriting
that turns personal memories into active cinema.
Produced alongside Dave 1 and the legendary funk architects Chromeo, RRROMEO is an LP of
beautiful collisions. Mexico City meeting Burbank; indie pop nostalgia crashing into analog funk
obsession. It sounds like darkwave rubbing shoulders with glossy synth-pop. Arabic samples,
Andean flutes, dub textures, gritty guitars, city-pop melodies, bloghouse chaos, and nightclub
romance existing in the same universe. Most importantly, it’s Girl Ultra at her most self-assured.
“Basically this comes to a joint of beautiful coincidences between my teenage self and my present
self,
” she says.
The story begins long before the studio sessions. Fifteen years ago, Girl Ultra was just another
music-obsessed teenager navigating Mexico City
'
s sprawling nightlife culture. She saved money to
see bands like Chromeo and Bloc Party, immersing herself in a city where dance floors became
classrooms and where genres coexisted without hierarchy. She grew up surrounded by radio
stations that still played Journey and Foreigner alongside Latin pop staples. She absorbed the
melancholy of Mexican nostalgia culture, the enduring love for sounds from decades past.
Girl Ultra and Dave 1 became internet friends sometime around 2017. At the time, she was
emerging from the SoundCloud R&B wave, building a reputation as one of Mexico
'
s most exciting
young voices. Dave followed her work. She followed his. The two would talk about music and what
a partnership could entail.
Then came the pandemic.
“We had so much time on our hands,
” Dave recalls.
“I was in the space where I wanted to start
collaborating with more up-and-coming artists. We were just like,
‘Yo, let'
s do a project together.
’”
At first, Dave imagined something different. Perhaps a Spanish-language cousin to early Maxwell
records. Maybe something inspired by Feist'
s earliest work. Girl Ultra had other ideas.
“She was adamant,
” Dave says.
“She didn't want to make R&B anymore. She was like,
‘I'm off the
R&B thing. I want to move forward from that.
’”
That decision would become the foundation of RRROMEO.Instead of revisiting familiar territory, Girl Ultra turned inward. She revisited the music she loved
before she ever made records: garage rock, house music, and the sounds that filled her childhood
home.
“I'
ve always been drawn to things that you think might not match,
” she says,
“but they
'
ve
always matched if you dig a little bit in the archive.
”
That archival instinct runs through every second of RRROMEO. Listen closely and you
'll hear
echoes of Mexican pop from the 1980s and ‘90s. You
'll hear shades of European synth-pop and
high-energy dance music alongside the influence of Chromeo
'
s beloved analog funk. Yet none of it
feels like revivalism; Girl Ultra isn't interested in recreating the past.
“She
'd always say,
‘I want it darker,
’” Dave remembers.
“Everything you hear that isn't the
downtown disco thing — that'
s her. The sitars, the textures, the weird sound effects, the dubby
elements. She added all that.
”
The result is an album that feels equally familiar and impossible to categorize.
One moment, RRROMEO sounds like an after-hours dance floor bathed in neon. The next, it
drifts into murky emotional terrain. Bright synthesizers flirt with distorted guitars. Pop melodies
arrive carrying traces of goth clubs and underground parties.
Girl Ultra calls it her “
synth-pop side quest,
” but in reality, it’s something deeper: a reflection of her
hometown itself.
“I feel like Mexico City is sonically just a beautiful chaos,
” she says.
“There is space for every sound.
It built me up to not be judgmental of sounds and music and let them all clash in a blender and see
what happens.
”
As a result, RRROMEO is perhaps Girl Ultra
'
s most narrative-driven project to date, where real
and fictionalized names address some kind of person in her life.
“There is something raw and
romantic in that,
” she explains.
“I find it key in this part of my career to be outspoken and address
songs to people that I know, to give tangible rendition to what they made me feel.
”
The songs on RRROMEO have faces, histories and consequences attached to them, a storytelling
impulse that immediately stood out to Dave.
“Nobody writes a song about their homegirl,
” he says,
discussing the song “Denisse.
” Inspired by a high-school friend navigating the end of a significant
relationship, the song unfolds like a movie. Memories surface and music becomes the road map to
various epiphanies.
“It'
s a message of letting go and flying away from something that you don't
want,
” Girl Ultra says.
At its core, RRROMEO is a record about romance as rebellion.“People are afraid of it,
” Girl Ultra says of the overture.
“People don't dance anymore. They don't
kiss at the club. They
're worried about being recorded. We
're too paranoid and afraid of making
out.
”
RRROMEO pushes against that fear with songs that celebrate desire and fully embrace eroticism
and intimacy. They linger in anticipation, tension, and imagination.
“Love and lust come to play in
this record as how I experience them now as a grown-up woman,
” she explains.
“From a very
playful perspective, treating it like it'
s a lost art of which I am fully in control.
”
That emphasis on suggestion connects the album to an older lineage of pop songwriting. Girl Ultra
points to the sensual storytelling of the 1960s,
'70s, and '80s, when songs painted scenes rather than
simply stating facts. Dave hears those influences, too.
“It'
s very traditional,
” he says.
“Very elegant.
Dionne Warwick. Carole King. Anita Baker. It'
s refined.
” That elegance anchors RRROMEO even
as the music shifts shape. And perhaps that'
s the project'
s greatest achievement. The album never
feels trapped by its references. Instead, it treats musical history as something to converse with rather
than imitate.
By the time the LP reaches its final moments, Girl Ultra has effectively redrawn the boundaries of
her own project. The artist who once emerged from the SoundCloud R&B generation now
operates according to a completely different set of rules. Or maybe no rules at all.
“Girl Ultra can be whatever I choose it to be at the moment,
” she says.
What began as a collaboration between a lifelong fan and one of her formative influences became
something far more interesting: a document of artistic self-discovery where multiple decades,
cultures and musical philosophies coexist. RRROMEO embraces imperfection, contradiction and
experimentation in pursuit of something human, all while remembering how to have fun. In the
end, the album doesn’t ask permission because Girl Ultra no longer needs it. She’s finally holding
the pen now — and writing her name across the night in glowing neon script.
