Lexi Valentine brings the different pieces of her identity together on Lo Claroscuro, a deeply personal new album exploring change, healing and self-acceptance, featuring the warm and reflective single “Niña Feliz.”
Lexi Valentine has released her new album Lo Claroscuro, a bilingual exploration of identity and acceptance shaped by a period when nearly every corner of her life seemed to be shifting at once.
The record follows a difficult stretch for Valentine, who spent much of last year traveling between Mexico City and Toronto while her father dealt with ongoing health issues. At the same time, she was processing the end of a long-term relationship and confronting a complicated sense of homesickness that extended beyond geography.
Born into a Mexican family and based in Mexico City since 2018, Valentine found herself caught between different places and versions of herself. After stepping away from music following the pandemic, returning to songwriting became a way to stop treating those identities as contradictions.
That idea gives Lo Claroscuro its name. Borrowing from the artistic interplay of light and shadow, the album allows joy and pain, Mexico and Canada, and Valentine’s past and present to coexist rather than forcing one side to eclipse the other. English and Spanish similarly intermingle naturally throughout the record.
Produced with longtime collaborator Jon Drew, Lo Claroscuro also draws contributions from musicians associated with Magneta Lane, The Balconies, Controller Controller, SeaDaisy and Neverending White Lights.
That emotional philosophy comes into particularly sharp focus on “Niña Feliz,” released ahead of the album on August 13. Wrapped in lush indie-pop textures, the single approaches happiness not as a clean escape from difficult experiences, but as something that can emerge while carrying them forward.
There is no grand reinvention at the center of Lo Claroscuro. Instead, Valentine embraces integration, making room for the experiences, cultures and former selves that brought her here.
On an album built around light and darkness sharing the same frame, that sense of wholeness becomes its own kind of resolution.