Over the course of her first two full-length releases as Half Gringa, Chicago-based singer, multi-instrumentalist, and songwriter Isabel Olive has demonstrated stunning emotional intelligence and songwriting elegance. And it has not gone unnoticed. The Chicago Reader named Half Gringa’s debut, Gruñona as among Chicago’s Best Albums of the Decade while VICE named her sophomore full-length, Force to Reckon as one of 22 Essential Albums of 2020, saying that Half Gringa specializes in “empathic and twangy songs about grief and getting stuck in your own thoughts.” True as that may be, her third and latest album Cosmovisión represents a shift. Recorded in Chicago by veteran Califone and Iron & Wine producer Brian Deck, Cosmovisión captures Olive at her most self-possessed, addressing “mythology, mortality, and everything in between,” ideas that Olive says are “too hot to touch, too huge to hold.” Indeed, Half Gringa seems to revel in addressing what cannot be grasped or expressed so easily. Olive commonly switches between English and Spanish in her songs. It’s a tribute –– as is the band name –– to her upbringing by a Venezuelan mother and an American father in a Midwestern town. But the bilingualism is not a mere token. For one thing, Olive does not simply sing verses in English and then repeat them in Spanish. Rather there are discrete lines sung in English and in Spanish, respectively. And so one has the sense that the “cosmovisión” is in fact attained only through the bilingualism and the biculturalism, that such are existential orientations. “Too hot to touch, too huge to hold,” and maybe too complex to sing about in only one language. “Honesty never buried oracle / Its proof of life is the only solace / Quién dijo eso? / Que no sabes nada? / Quién dijo eso? / (What’s the word) / Que no sabes nada?” And what’s more, the Spanish phrasings are often constructed so as to be open to interpretation, far from conclusive or rigid. This is artful, certainly, but it also points to the “both, and” nature of an upbringing in a diasporic environment. As Gloria Anzaldúa says of the mestizaje experience: “Soy un arnasamiento, I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings.” It isn’t that Half Gringa’s songs exist statically in between two potential interpretations, but that the very nature of language for Isabel Olive is movement in multiple directions, toward multiple understandings and playful interpretations, all of which is both messy and beautiful. “It took a while for me to realize that it's not a shortcoming not to be able to perfectly explain or contextualize your experience as a person,” Olive says.Though there are clear throughlines between Half Gringa’s celebrated earlier records and Cosmovision, the questions are bigger this time and the messiness is embraced as a necessary side effect of asking questions on such a scale. “It's hard to live in the weeds of your interiority,” Olive says, “and then see the huge, frightening picture around you.” Fans of Cass McCombs’s or Beth Orton’s philosophical songwriting will find much to love on this record. Likewise for fans of contemporaries like Jess Williamson. And there are moments in which the potent and harnessed melancholia of Olive’s songcraft echoes that of Lisa Germano. But this work stands apart from those artists. It is distinctly Half Gringa because it is only Olive who stands in front of these particular ancestors, who wields this particular perspective and experience, this particular “cosmovisión.”