Hello World, ISABELLA LOVESTORY Is Your Wild Girl, with New Single ‘Cherry Bomb’

With her second release of the year, Isabella Lovestory debuts new single ‘Cherry Bomb’, a raunchy neo-perreo club anthem. 

Irreverent, playful and outrageous are words that come to mind when watching the new music video for ‘Cherry Bomb’. 

It features her classically raunchy, tongue-in-cheek lyrics and is well matched by pulsing, night-rider visuals. ‘Cherry Bomb’ sees Lovestory dancing alone in a glossy high-rise dance studio, or in a convoy of gold-clad dancers on a grungy rooftop in Mexico City. 

Flashing pink and blue lights set the scene for this perreo-pop banger. The self-directed video testifies, however, to a far more polished and cinematographic set of aesthetics, a far, though not too distant, cry from the DIY sentiment of previous tracks like ‘JETAIME’, or ‘Kitten Heel’. 

As reggaeton has moved further and further into the mainstream, the subgenre of neo-perreo has created a desire amongst young artists, such as Honduras-born Lovestory, to break away from the glossier, commercially produced sounds of contemporary reggaeton giants like J Balvin and Bad Bunny. 

The suggestive songwriting on ‘Cherry Bomb’, accompanied by the hard, classic reggaeton beat, produced by long-time collaborator Chicken, is focalised as always through a distinctly feminine lens. This is what makes Lovestory so exciting. She wants to shock, to scandalise – but everything is on her own terms. ‘Cherry Bomb’, in a way, is nothing new. 

For a reggaeton-listening audience, the dem bow riddim and Lovestory’s lightly autotuned flow are by no means revolutionary, and yet, there is something entirely refreshing in Lovestory’s approach to this male-dominated genre. Her lyrics are cheeky, they poke fun at the presentation of female desire as presented by men, subverting the object as subject, and placing herself squarely in the driver's seat as queen of her own faculties. Yes, she twerks and wines and appears in the video for ‘Cherry Bomb’ as a verified video vixen. But she is the one in control. She decides what she wants to show and how she wants to show it. 

This is, after all, Isabella Lovestory’s world, we’re all just lucky to be living in it.

Briá Purdy

Image:  Luke Abby