NOIA's Gisela Silvestre has spent the last few years in a creative shell, experimenting with new sounds and techniques, hence the title of her EP, Crisàlida, a Catalan word for “cocoon.” Across the EP’s four tracks, NOIA unites the disparate styles of her musical heritage as traditional arias flutter atop leftfield pop production and lyrics float between Catalan and English. According to Gisela, the EP is a collage of emotion: “Waiting on someone to fill my own absences, heartbreak somehow for what didn’t happen but could have happened, feeling trapped in the city of New York.”

Written and recorded in Gisela's home studio in Brooklyn and a house in the Appalachian mountains, where she undertook an artist residency, Crisàlida explores new sonic territory for NOIA. She dedicated a portion of the past few years to practicing the folk Catalan and Spanish singing traditions that backlit her youth. The result is a more lyrical approach to melody as illustrated on the EP’s opener "Ausencias," which could well be a traditional Spanish ballad, embellished with heavy sound design, and on "La Nit Ve Sola," a sprawling ambient cut based on a poem by poet Maria Merce Marçal. Elsewhere on the EP, NOIA revisits the glitchy and glittery pop that made her debut, Habits, so special.

What emerges from Crisàlida is a confluence of cultures, fusing the traditional musical traditions of NOIA’s native country, along with her own intuitive approach to pop songwriting.