Last year, Indiana felt ready to come back to music. In Puerto Rico, she rediscovered quiet and returned to writing, publishing three novels, including “Tentacle” (2015), a gender-bending sci-fi story set in a near-future Dominican Republic in the aftermath of an environmental catastrophe, and, most recently, “Made in Saturn” (2018), an acerbic comic novel about a flailing, drug-addled Dominican artist who is sent to dry out in Havana, so as not to embarrass his corrupt father in the middle of a political campaign. She’d achieved international recognition, but her notoriety at home made daily life intolerable: she couldn’t go anywhere in Santo Domingo without being asked for autographs or selfies. She had left Santo Domingo and settled in San Juan, a self-imposed exile from the music industry and from a kind of fame that had drained her. When Cabra first approached Indiana about a possible collaboration, several years ago, she demurred. The album, the forty-three-year-old Indiana’s first in a decade, was produced by Eduardo Cabra, of the legendary Puerto Rican band Calle 13. It’s no accident that Indiana calls “Mandinga Times” “a songbook for the apocalypse.” Not every cut maintains this rhythm, but even the quiet ones have a certain urgency. The title song, which races along at a hundred and ninety beats per minute, is a frenetic, danceable soundtrack for this miserable moment, a song that transforms pain and worry into something plaintive, angry, and defiant. Surely this is part of the reason that, for the past several weeks, I’ve been listening to the Dominican novelist and musician Rita Indiana’s masterly new album, “Mandinga Times,” on repeat. It all happened so fast, or at least it feels that way, speed being an essential feature of this bewildering era we’re staggering through-the relentless, furious acceleration of it all. We’ve submitted willingly to mass surveillance and filled the oceans with microscopic plastics the climate refugees, it turns out, are us. The world’s most powerful democracy teeters, and children sleep in cages at its southern border.

Smoke billows across the West, submerging our cities in a murky orange twilight more than two hundred thousand Americans die of a virus whose dangers half the country seems intent on ignoring. Now these thoughts are constant, the thrumming background noise of ordinary life, a vast and terrifyingly specific catalogue of horrors. If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can recall what it felt like to go days at a time without considering the end of the world.

Tentacle rita indiana