The Hot-Pink Effervescence of Judith, Chingona Pop Star-in-Waiting
A 27-year-old restaurant server made some of the best pop songs of the year
In a huge year for bubblegum-pink pop music—from the winky wiles of Charli XCX to the candy-cane coquettishness of Sabrina Carpenter—the best I heard in 2024 came from Judith, a mononymous 27-year-old with bangs who daylights as a restaurant server and lives in Los Angeles with three roommates. With just a handful of songs and a cheeky array of videos to accompany them, Judith makes unexpected confections in Spanish and English, singing by turns in breathy mewls, wavy modulations, and sneery screams over shiny-seeming beats that draw from trap, pop-punk, and reggaetón.
Por ejemplo: On “Superboom,” an effervescent jam that in a less corporatized world would have been up there on the charts next to your wee “Espresso,” she professes her devotion to a lover in a sweetly longing voice. The superboom in question is either a heartbeat or a lusty come-on, but either way it provides an unshakeable chorus punctuated by eager “wow”s across a glittery sprinkle of synths and bass. Its video, which begins at a TikTok dance video shoot in a parking garage and ends in a throuple, showcases a charisma that plays up her knowing innocence.
Pop music wasn’t always in the cards for Judith. When she first started messing around with music as a weekend hobby, she was working at a law firm in the Maryland suburb where she grew up, and had a mind towards becoming an attorney. Singing had been a luxury she thought was reserved solely for school and in her strict Adventist home. While her father also played music, the family playlists were generally restricted to classical music and Christian hymnals in Spanish. Plus, as a first-generation, Mexican-Honduran American, she had the added immigrant-child pressure to make something respectable of herself—a regular 9-to-5, at least, and a steady salary. When young Judith saw musicians on television growing up, she assumed their parents were rich or something. “I didn’t have dreams of being an artist,” she tells me over Zoom from her L.A. place, which costs each roommate $1,100 a month. “I never thought it was allowed for me to dream those things.”
Still, she began tinkering with her friend, the producer Elie Rizk, and eventually she figured out how to wield her voice. Having only been opened up to the world of secular music in the last few years, pop wasn’t necessarily instinctive to her—she says she first heard the Beatles, for instance, at age 23—and even now she’s still taking in new-to-her styles that inspire her in unpredictable ways. It sounds like the music is going off in her brain like firecrackers. “I want a country song. I want a corrido in a song. I want reggaetón in a song. I want screaming in a song,” she says without taking a breath. “It’s been such an eye-opening thing for me, where I’m just like, ‘What if I did rock and roll?’ And everyone’s like, ‘What?’ I’m like, ‘You don’t get it. I just wanna do everything.’”
Judith made her way to L.A. a few years ago, after Rizk informed her that he was moving there to start a record label, and that he would sign her on the spot if she came with him. “I was like, ‘You’re fucking crazy! Your parents are rich! You don’t know!’” she says with a laugh. “‘I can’t just get up and leave everything that I’ve worked so hard for—I’m gonna disappoint my parents.’” But as more and more of her friends moved to California, Judith, like many young and aspiring artists before her, came to a decision: “Well, fuck it,” she told herself. “I’m 23, I’m never gonna have a chance in my life like this again, and there’s nothing I love more than singing.” The opportunity forced her to confront what she truly wanted. “I just never had anyone to expand my horizons,” she adds. “And so, when somebody presented me with the question, I was like, I really might be able to do this.”
Los Angeles, of course, was and is Los Angeles: It was new and hard, she was dead broke, and she had to adjust to the unfamiliar West Coast cultural vibe. “I started making English music just because I thought that’s what everyone wanted to hear,” she says, which resulted in a few sweet songs that are catchy but don’t quite have the thundering conviction of her more recent work. “When I started writing in Spanish—that’s really at my core, who I am, how I can express myself the most. For the first time, I was like, ‘I don’t care if no one likes it. I care that I like it.’”
On Judith’s new song, “Heather,” she sings delicately and defiantly in Spanish about her mom calling her a chingona (badass), shoplifting, possibly class war (depending on your interpretation), and the alienation one can feel as an ESL first-gen in the U.S.—before dropping a biting chorus on ’em in an English twang: “Maybe I would do better/If I talked like Heather/I could get my shit together/I could live like this forever.” The beat, by Rizk, traverses Y2K-style, sample-based hip-hop, distorted alt-country, reggaetón, and a tinge of mid-’90s acoustic alt-rock, creating the exact sort of varied musical world Judith dreams about.
“Heather” is upbeat, but it also delivers little electric shocks of social critique—“pendejos ya lo tienen todo,” she sings of the wealth hoarded by the ruling class, before addressing a few of the ways she’s been mistreated and underestimated. In the video, a cadre of white folks in clown make-up surround her ominously as they try to get her to change—a cartoon parody of “what the trauma is within the industry as a Latina,” she says, “and what it feels like to feel silenced without them even realizing it.”
But Judith also sings about how “mama me llamo chingona,” that her mother admires her courage, and their relationship is wrapped up in this delicious pop joint, too. “My mom is the most proud of me because I’m myself. I didn’t conform,” she says. “I’m not who my parents thought they wanted me to be, I ended up being what I am. In the end, they see that, but the middle space in between is rough, because you just constantly feel like you’re letting everyone down. Being an artist, your parents are like, ‘Are you crazy? Did I come to this country for you to do that?’ Technically, no, but my happiness really matters. ‘Heather’ means all of those things to me—all of that in one big, cute, crazy, weird, funky, exciting song.”
Judith connects her artistry to her desire for social justice—there’s a rhetorical line in “Heather” wondering where our taxes go—and in our conversation, we digress for a few minutes to discuss our mutual support for a free Palestine. And though she’s released just a handful of songs in the past year—including the metal dembow “Ugh!,” the cheeky electro joint “Me Lo Merezco,” and the massive club track “Nada”—she represents a fresh vision of what a young pop star ought to be: witty, politically engaged, expressing complex, substantial ideas, and making glossy, brassy bangers with hooks that I play on repeat until my boyfriend and cats are sick of me and tell me to stop.
After Judith released “Nada” at the end of last year, she went “off the grid” for a few months to work on various mental health issues. Getting help for anxiety and depression changed her relationship to her own music, and she says dealing with her past, from abuse to religious trauma, has been influencing her new work. “My next thing is trying to be more open and honest about my life and what I’ve experienced,” she says. “I need my music to be a little bit of a mess, because I need it to reflect how I’m feeling inside. Otherwise I’m not going to connect to it at all.” Thus “Heather,” which dropped in mid-October on Rizk’s label, Good Boy Records. There are more singles on the horizon, to be released at a pace that is certainly not fast enough for her biggest fans (i.e., me).
Even with all the creativity, Judith is still excavating on her new path, and she hasn’t given up her other dream. “If I’m ever a big artist, or even just a millionaire, I want to be an immigration attorney,” she says. “And I would want to be pro bono.” Let a chingona do both!
