Judeline’s unstoppable rise: From Cádiz to Coachella

Last Saturday at noon, castanets pealed out across the Californian desert. They belonged to Lara Blanco, better known as Judeline. The 22-year-old singer from the Spanish city of Cádiz was performing at Coachella, one of the largest and most important music festivals in the world.

Judeline is part of a lineup of 170 artists including Lady Gaga, Post Malone and Green Day, and Latin performers such as Argentina’s Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso, Mexico’s Junior H and Venezuela’s Rawayana. Aside from Madrid DJ Dennis Cruz, who played the night before, Judeline is the festival’s only Spanish act this year — a major achievement for a young woman who, though quickly rising in Spain, has only one album to her name, Bodhiria, released in October 2024.

Judeline performed at Sonora, one of the festival’s eight stages, where shouts of “Viva Cádiz,” “Viva Jérez,” and “Vivan Los Caños” rang out. “Even when I’m performing in a place as far from home as Tokyo, you always hear a ‘Viva Cádiz,’” she says.

In a 40-minute set (the standard slot length for Coachella artists except the headliners), Judeline delivered a dozen songs accompanied by two musicians and a dancer, in a show that was more of a performance piece than a traditional concert. On Saturday, she’ll return to the stage.

Still riding an emotional high Sunday morning, she told EL PAÍS it was important for her to stay true to herself, even while being discovered by new fans.

“The more intense a concert, the more important it is to me, and the more emotional I get the next day,” she says during the interview. “And with the serotonin, the full-on adrenaline… After the highs always comes the low,” she laughs. “I still haven’t processed what happened yesterday, but I’m super-happy.”

She performed on the festival’s smallest stage, but the Sonora was still big enough to fit hundreds of people. It helped that the area was “more intimate, darker,” she says. At times, it seemed to her as though she was at a recital in the city, but then she’d remember that it was Coachella, and her nerves would return.

“I liked it a lot, it was very beautiful and I felt that we were well-received. Sometimes, when they are discovering you for the first time and don’t know who you are, it’s a bit strange. But although there were a lot of people who weren’t completely familiar with my music, I felt that they were truly supportive of what they were hearing, and enjoying it.”

For Judeline, reaching new listeners was a fundamental part of the concert. Although there were Spaniards in the front row and many more connected through the YouTube stream of the festival, she had other priorities.

“I felt that a lot of people were discovering me. To me, that was almost more important than seeing people who already knew me — for people who didn’t know anything about me to discover me. That’s what happens at a festival that is as high-profile as Coachella.”

Performing at a mega-event like Coachella, which is attended by 125,000 people, is one of the best opportunities a musician can have. It came to Judeline, “believe it or not, in a more organic way than it might seem.”

“No one can do that work for you. Coachella has to like your project and decide that you have to be part of it,” she says.

She recalls how, a few years ago, someone from the festival took an interest in her and supported her project, but it wasn’t until later that she found out she was part of the lineup.

“I was blown away. At the time, I had 100,000 monthly listeners on digital platforms,” she says — now she has more than two million monthly listens on Spotify. “Once you’re in the spotlight, I guess it’s easy for that to happen, you know? They’ve followed my journey. We had the opportunity to have dinner with a couple of them the last time I was in Los Angeles, and it worked out.”

Once she knew that she’d be performing, Judeline decided that it was important to maintain her true essence. “I didn’t want to bring something totally different, it didn’t make sense, people don’t really know who I am,” she says. For the big moment, she wore a very Coachella-style look, created by the stylist Morena: a fringed mini-skirt and cowboy boats, a festival staple.

In addition to debuting a new song, she also broke out the castanets. “My grandmother played the castanets very well, and she tried to teach me. But there was no way — I had a little bit of attention deficit disorder and anything that requires practice is hard for me. Last night was a little nod to her: also, I’ve been taking classes since December,” she says. “For that silly thing I did, which wasn’t even that much!,” she laughs, “but wow, those things are complicated.”

Knowing that most of the crowd was from the United States, Judeline addressed them in English. But she recognizes that when she performs in the country, many of her fans there speak Spanish. “It’s a multicultural country, they’re used to it. I think that if I wrote my lyrics in English they’d be worse, so I carry my language like a flag, and my Andalusian accent too.”

For the singer, it’s incredible to form part of the festival’s lineup — and the same goes for Blanco, the person behind the artist. She herself said so during the concert: “If I could do a FaceTime with my eight-year-old self, I wouldn’t believe it.”

She revisits this thought during the interview. “It’s a dream. Yesterday I thought, ‘If I told this to my inner child or adolescent…’ I was always obsessed with Coachella, what celebrities were there, who performed, the styling… It’s something you see from so, so far away and then it happens and you don’t even realize it. It’s very strange. I think in the next few days I’ll take a moment to think about it,” she laughs.

She has a few days to reflect before the festival returns on Saturday, April 19. She recognizes that she needs to polish a few details of her set, but overall, was content with the results. Between the two weekends, she traveled to Los Angeles, to do a concert with the Mexican artist El Malilla. Then she has dates in Mexico City and New York. And she’s sure of one thing: wherever she goes, she’ll keep hearing the shouts of “Viva Cádiz.”

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