Ambar Lucid is extremely online, but she’s trying not to be. Like the rest of us, the 19-year-old singer is currently stuck at home, attempting to avoid the digital cesspool of social media. She hasn’t been entirely successful. Her Twitter feed is stacked with quarantine memes and retweets of faves like Grimes and Rosalía, and she’s regularly uploading trippy psychedelic experiments to TikTok. But practicing social distancing isn’t too difficult for her. “I’ve been doing pretty much everything that I usually do,” she tells me over FaceTime. “Just playing music, reading, writing, or watching stuff on YouTube.”
Ambar is waiting out the pandemic with her family at her childhood home in Little Ferry, a New Jersey suburb that she’s just returned to after spending a year and a half chasing her musical aspirations in Los Angeles. She doesn’t romanticize home, but she says she’s happy to be back. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to be experiencing all of this alone.”
And yet, Ambar is the first to admit she spent a lot of time by herself in high school. “I would always be in the corner of the classroom asleep, trying to avoid human contact as much as possible,” she says. In conversation, she still seems a little bit like a lone wolf—the ultra-cool stoner misfit you wish you were friends with. Calling from her kitchen, she’s serene, wearing a firetruck-red T-shirt and a retro choker. She sports chipped purple nails and a pair of rogue magenta streaks frame her face, like a punk Ginger Spice. When she speaks, she often drops a “literally” for emphasis. Talking about some of her inspirations, she includes contemporaries like Willow Smith and the 25-year-old, Colombian-American soul singer Kali Uchis. “Bitch, I grew up listening to Kali Uchis,” she says, grinning and slapping her fist in her hand. “As a 14-year-old, Kali Uchis was iconic to me.”
Back then, Ambar was still daydreaming about what she wanted her life to look like. Now, she’s manifested that dream: Her just-released debut album, Garden of Lucid, is a soul-stirring collection of bilingual tracks about escape, empowerment, and radical acceptance of self. The record swaps out the self-made bedroom aesthetic of her 2019 EP Dreaming Lucid for a more sumptuous sound created in the studio with the up-and-coming production duo the Wavys. Its greatest strength is Ambar’s rich vocal performance. Both brassy and hushed, her voice has a physicality that transcends the body—at times, it swells the youthful longing of her lyrics into arena-sized agony; at others, it floats in the air before fluttering into a plush embrace, lingering in space.
Ambar’s bilingual storytelling particularly excels when she interlaces vivid, spectral imagery in Spanish with profound abjection in English. The celestial “Cuando” finds her searching for respite from deep despair. “I’m drowned in my own guilt/It wraps around me and hides all I’ve built,” she sings. “¿Cuándo florecerán las rosas en me?” (“When will the roses bloom in me?”) She attributes her knack for bilingual songwriting to a Spanish for native speakers class she took in high school, where she read excerpts from classics like Don Quijote.
The album’s aesthetic range, from indie-pop arrangements to dembow textures, is another signal of her artistic promise. Ambar has already garnered an impressive following, amassing more than 600,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. She counts other young Latinx artists like Omar Apollo and Cuco as her peers and, like them, her music speaks to a generation of immigrant kids. But it would be too simplistic to read Ambar’s vision solely through the lens of identity or language; her music eclipses these boundaries and offers affirmation for anyone who has felt like they aren’t enough.
Ambar was born in the U.S. to a Dominican mother and a Mexican father, and she started singing at the age of 5. In those early years, she’d convince her abuela to record videos of her singing in her music corner, where she’d play with a toy microphone and perform for her family. As she got older, she began to post covers on YouTube—videos that still lurk in the depths of the internet, though Ambar now calls them “very scary.” She is completely self-taught; she learned piano, guitar, and ukulele on her own, and turned to YouTube once again to refine her vocal technique when she started writing original music at 15.
She spent the ages of 5 to 7 moving between the Dominican Republic, where she lived with her grandmother, and New Jersey, where her mom resided. Her memories of this time are scarce, but she recalls small bursts of joy she’d experience when her mother sent her gifts from the States. “Getting Heelys in the mail while I lived in the D.R. was such an iconic moment in my childhood,” she remembers, giggling. “I was rolling everywhere.”
Eventually, Ambar moved to Jersey permanently. But her family was separated once again when she turned 8, as her father was deported to Mexico. Ambar wouldn’t see her dad in person again until 2019, when she traveled to Cabo San Lucas to reunite with him. That trip was captured in a 20-minute documentary called Llegaron Las Flores (The Flowers Have Arrived). By offering her own experience, she aimed to shed light on the harsh realities of family separation. “Even though so many people in my family had gone through similar things, nobody really spoke about it,” she says. “But there’s people out there that need to see that [others] are experiencing similar situations. I wanted people to not feel alone.”
Ambar Lucid: It was definitely one of the strangest things I’ve ever experienced. But I did get to spend some time with him prior to having anybody come to his house with cameras. I just didn’t know how it was going to feel, seeing him after all those years—I was scared that I wasn’t going to feel anything at all. When I’m actually experiencing things, I’m kind of numb to them. Then, when I really think about it, that’s when I feel the emotions. So it was very beautiful, but it was strange.
When we filmed that, my mom didn’t expect to get too in-depth about what she went through during that time—that’s not something she really talks about often. I think that was the first time I got to hear how she felt about what she had to go through. Growing up, I definitely couldn’t talk about it with friends, because one of the main things that anybody in my family would make sure to say was, “This is private. This is our business. People shouldn’t know about this.” That was always the mentality. Overall, it was a very healing experience for me and my mom.
I kept to myself for the most part. I really hated high school. My entire junior year I was stoned. I would hit my dab pen, go to school, and then I’d sit there and I’d just analyze everything around me. I’d be like, “Oh my god, nobody likes me. I don’t like anybody. I just wanna leave.” I would daydream the entire day about not having to go back to school. And for some reason, in my junior year, I knew that I wasn’t going back the next year, so I took it as my senior year. I was like, “OK, this isn’t gonna be forever, so I gotta appreciate my youth now.” The moment I finally put everything together to be able to move to L.A. was the happiest day of my life.
A lot of the stuff that I say in my music is stuff that I feel that many people need to hear. Or maybe they just need a reminder, or they don’t have somebody in their life that will tell them. A lot of it is stuff that I wish somebody would’ve told me when I was younger. That’s my biggest concern with music, to provide a certain healing for people that they can’t find anywhere in front of them.
I think “Universe” is my favorite song on the album. Having possession over somebody is so normalized to the point where people forget about themselves. I want people—especially women—to always remember that they have the right to be themselves and to choose themselves and to think about themselves before anyone else.
They also told me that if I sang in English it would be worse for me, because then people really wouldn’t pay attention. I sing both now. I can do both. If one day I decided, “Listen, I’ma sing all in Spanish,” it would be fine. If I write songs that don’t have any Spanish in them, it would be fine. It feels really good to prove the person that said that wrong, just because it was such a hurtful thing to hear as a child with such a big dream. I was literally told that in my own home, while I had a guitar in my hand.
I wanna inspire kids who get told things like that. My own fans tell me that when they feel really passionate about something, people will be like, “You’re crazy. You can’t do this. You shouldn’t be focusing all your time on that.” I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I had been like, “You know what? Maybe this person is right. Maybe I should focus on something else rather than music.” My life would be so sad.
