Girl Ultra & Chromeo Bring Sexy Back on New LP ‘RRRomeo’: Interview

At 15, Mariana de Miguel was already sneaking into Mexico City’s nightlife with a fake ID, saving money to see the bands that shaped her imagination. Among them was Chromeo, whose sleek, playful funk sound traveled through the city’s indie and electronic scenes. Years later, the artist known as Girl Ultra would find herself making a full album with Dave 1, one half of the duo she once watched from the crowd.

“It’s a funny full-circle moment,” she tells Billboard at the Del Maguey Single Village Music Series at National Sawdust in Brooklyn on Sept. 29, 10 days before the release of her latest album, RRRomeo, due Friday (Oct. 9).

Dave 1 first encountered Girl Ultra’s music around 2017 or 2018, when she was emerging from the SoundCloud R&B movement. The two became Instagram friends, and during the pandemic, he reached out with an idea: Chromeo could work with other artists, so “let’s do something.”

He initially imagined an R&B-funk album. Girl Ultra had another direction in mind. “She was like, ‘I don’t want to do R&B anymore,’” Dave recalls. “I was like, ‘OK, so come over and we’ll vibe and we’ll do stuff together.’”

That refusal became the foundation of RRRomeo. Produced alongside Dave 1, the record moves through analog funk, synth-pop, darkwave, dub, tropical textures and the cinematic residue of Mexico City nightlife. It is a collaboration between two artists with distinct musical identities — but also a story about one artist trusting another enough to let her pull the work somewhere unexpected.

“Everything — the way we look, the way we sound — is controlled,” Dave 1 explains. But with Girl Ultra, he handed over something he had never previously given another artist: the Pro Tools sessions and stems. “She took it and brought all these other things to it,” he says. “It’s so cool.”

Girl Ultra describes the material she received from Chromeo as “pristine funk,” a purist foundation she could then filter through her own darker instincts. “I’m a dark girly,” she says. Her contributions include hypnotic sitar-like melodies, gritty textures, dub elements and a wider palette of references drawn from the sounds that surrounded her growing up.

“I grew up with a rock dad, radio mom,” she says, describing a home where ’80s rock, romantic pop and Mexican music could coexist without judgment. “I never felt judgmental about music, so I’m a sucker for references.”

That sensibility is central to RRRomeo. Girl Ultra calls Mexico City “beautiful and chaotic and messy and gritty,” and says she learned to bring that clash into her music: “a little chaos and then just trying to polish it a bit.” Dave 1 understood the instinct immediately, even when the results took him by surprise. “I really didn’t see it,” Dave 1 says of her vision for the album. “I knew what I thought it was going to sound like, and then she just took them and added another dimension.”

On “El Groove de Romeo,” the album’s opening track, Girl Ultra invites listeners toward “the gates of hell and desire and romance,” she describes. “MentirasMentiras,” featuring Buscabulla, turns deception into something more complicated and seductive, exploring the possibility that being lied to can become addictive — even a kink. The track’s looping, shadowy textures create what Girl Ultra calls a “dark passage.”

“Denisse,” meanwhile, is one of the album’s brightest and most narrative-driven songs. Built around the story of a high-school friend leaving behind a youthful relationship, it moves with tropical sparkle and a reggae-leaning pulse. For Dave 1, the song’s perspective is part of what makes it so unusual. “Who writes a song about their friend?” he asks. “You write the song about you.” Girl Ultra sees the song differently: writing to another person can be “opening up a portal.”

The album’s title character is a composite — “a Frankenstein,” as Girl Ultra puts it — assembled from the people and experiences that have moved through her life. But RRRomeo is not only interested in the pain or nostalgia attached to romance. It wants desire to feel physical again. She believes modern-day nightlife has become too “self-conscious,” with phones and constant observation making people afraid to dance, sweat or make out without worrying about how the moment will look later. “I feel like we feel too seen now,” she says. “Everything has to be so polished.”

That is why the album’s visual world centers on a direct, unapologetic kiss. For the cover, Girl Ultra recruited Sergio Mayer Mori — the son of Mexican telenovela stars Bárbara Mori and Sergio Mayer — and asked him to make out with her for four hours, unpaid, while they tried to capture the image. “It’s just nice to actually embrace the feral part of wanting in general,” she says. “I wave my flag of PDA and just making out.”

Listen to RRRomeo below.