On the cover for Doga, her eighth studio album and latest record released, it is no coincidence that Juana Molina's face is superimposed onto a shaggy dog, a creature that registers your presence without ever returning your gaze. The image is funny and uncanny at once: a joke with teeth. It is also, in its way, a thesis statement.

Molina, 64, is one of Argentina's most singular musicians: an experimental pop composer whose music blends folk guitar, layered vocals, analogue synths, and looping structures into something playful and strange. Before music, she was a major TV comedian in the 1990s, starring in her own sketch show and becoming a household name. For years, she was Argentina's answer to Kate McKinnon, dressing up, shapeshifting, and impersonating others on one of the country's most­watched programmes. She quit comedy at the height of her fame and disappeared into sound, releasing her debut album Rara in 1996 to bewildered critics. Since then, she has built a cult international following with albums such as Segundo, Tres Casas, Son, and Halo.

Now playing the role of herself, Molina does not like to be looked at and loathes self.inspection. When I ask how she would impersonate herself, she recoils. "My drummer [does] this impression of me," she says. "Everybody laughs. I hate it." What does it look like? "Messy," she says vaguely, then quickly steers the conversation elsewhere.

She is sitting in her studio, adjacent to the house in the Buenos Aires suburbs she bought from her mother, who had inherited it. Drums and keyboards crowd the space; to her left, the tapestry from the cover of her 2006 album Son hangs on the wall. Her three dogs mill around the living room she has ceded to them, fur coating the couches. They bark as a deliveryman knocks at the door. Listen very closely, and you can hear those barks on Doga, too.

During the making of the album, Molina spent many hours wrestling with unruly synthesisers, threading cables and finding frequencies just bright and wonky enough to live in her world. It was a labour of attunement, a negotiation between her hands, her ears, and the instruments themselves. It is this instinct-driven, hands-on approach that has long set her apart, and that frustrates those who try to pin her work to language.

Over the years, Molina has grown faintly disturbed by journalists who offer their insights into her work, asking her questions that attempt to bind instinct to terminology. When she first started, she made loops, though she never would have used that word. She simply repeated things because it felt right. She still does. She resists thought and language in every way. In that sense, she is dog-like in spirit, existing solely on nerves and play.

It took time for her to learn how to communicate with collaborators. On her first album, she felt she had to subjugate herself to her producer, who directed the entire process: assembling the band, making the decisions. She didn't like that experience. She is in full control now. That first record, Rara, was poorly received, not because of its content, she believes, but because of her abrupt public realignment. "Everybody was talking about why I left TV instead of talking about the record," she says.

She became so uncomfortable when she began playing music in public that she'd shake. "Because it was me, myself. I was naked, I was vulnerable," she says. As a TV comedian, she felt empowered enough to snap back at people who disrespected her; she was still in character. "I could say whatever I wanted because it wasn't me saying it." In music, she answers only to herself. "Comedy starts inside and [moves] outwards to the skin; music [travels] from the skin to the inside," she explains. Her songs are sonograms of her internal world, tuned to an internal metronome. She lives by her own clock. Outwardly, she obscures herself any way she can.

Each of her album covers is a distinct iteration of concealment. They are always both funny and eerie in equal measure. On Halo, she is merely eyes on a bone; on Un Dia, she is bisected by a narrow mirror seam. Having a simple photo of herself on album covers doesn't interest her. "If you do that, you'll want to be pretty. And what do you do with a pretty photo?" For Molina, beauty is a dead end: "Someone might say you look pretty, and all you can do is blink."

Molina never felt pressure to be beautiful, and she traces that freedom, in part, to something she sees as racialised. Her former boss at the TV station called her the "Blonde Indian", a nickname that gave her permission to look ridiculous. He called the few women who worked behind the scenes the "Blonde Whites": women who styled themselves to be pretty, dressed in high heels "with their chests served on a tray", as Molina puts it. To this day, when she's forced to present herself publicly-now via social media-she uses ridiculous filters, distorting her face into something monstrous or absurd. She fundamentally resists vanity.

Throughout the years, Molina and her visual collaborator Alejandro Ros have found ways to put her face on the cover of her albums that remain to her liking, always resulting in laughter. "We laugh so much while making these pictures," she says. "It's exactly what we need."

The album cover for Doga came from a candid photo she had of herself. She calls it her Picasso: her head slightly askew, her eyes turned in different directions. She sent it to Ros. "All of a sudden, he brought this idea of a dog, with that picture as its head, and I loved it, loved it, loved it," she says, clapping her hands together. "I couldn't stop laughing. It was brilliant."

Comedy always follows Molina into her music. There is a moment on track seven of Doga that captures that sensibility perfectly. A frog-like, belching sound ribbits across the track, despite having nothing to do with the mood or tone of the song itself. Molina placed it several decibels louder than anyone would advise. Her producer suggested turning it down. They briefly fought about it. "I called it 'the Indian'," she says, laughing. kill the creative process. In her one-woman show in the '90s, she skewered self-serious troubadours through a character she called Judith. Seriousness, she insists, is not musical. "There's humour in the language of music itself," she says. After recording a song, Molina typically sends it first to her friend Alejandro Franov. ''And ifhe doesn't laugh, I know I'm in trouble."

Her rascal humour dims only when the conversation turns to Argentina's current president, the pro-Israeli, anarcho-capitalist Javier Milei, whose administration has slashed cultural funding and significantly rolled back environmental regulation nationwide. "It's appalling what he does because there's no [accountability]," says Molina, who despises the prospect of an Argentina shaped by private property, where mountains are flattened into golf courses. "Even people who just want to go to lakes are shot and killed," she says. "I don't understand how people don't realise the importance of accessing the glaciers, the water, the mountains, the trees, the air."

This is Molina's mind outside of music. She shuts it all out when she plays, spending full days and nights in the studio playing the same melody over and over, often falling asleep while still upright in her chair. "Many things have been recorded that way," she says: when she is half-asleep, her fingers turn to autopilot and tap at the guitar, independent of her mind. The Juana Molina way. "Those are the best times because thought doesn't interfere." She compares it to the state of Zen, to pure presence. "I am led by the instruments, which is why my sessions take so long," she says. The first versions of her songs are usually at least 15 minutes long. "As soon as my mind wakes up and my attention gets caught, I stop," she says. Her songs are groove-forward, bodily, and instinctive. There is hardly anything cerebral about them.

The singer fights all the time with collaborators who tell her how long she has been playing for. "Tell me my song is two-and-a-half minutes long, and I'll never want to see you again," Molina says. She shakes her head. "It's ridiculous to think about time when you're doing a song. The song tells you how long it is."

For Molina, composition never proceeds in units: one part demands time, another develops, something else arrives, and suddenly there is the end. She trails off dreamily while describing her creative process, then a dog barks once again, making her aware of her surroundings. She is, regrettably, back in her mind.

Hair GALO SAPAIA at NICHE
Makeup SOL LEMONNI
Photography Assistant CAMILO DIAZ SALAMANCO
Production SONIA STIGLIANO

THIS STORY IS TAKEN FROM LOVE S/S 26 ISSUE, NOW AVAILABLE AT KD PRESSE.