Just a few months ago, hit Spanish singer-songwriter Judeline stared down at 2025 and felt the scale of where her career might go after the success of her debut 2024 album Bodhiria. On the horizon: her first major tour with three international stops and 16 across Spain, a tour so popular she had to add extra shows to accommodate growing demand, resulting in three back-to-back shows in Madrid.
“That does stress me out,” she tells Teen Vogue, sitting at her Interscope’s HQ in the city before the tour, munching on a croissant. “I’m like, f*ck, maybe we should have made the tour bigger, people are being left out. It stresses me, but it also pushes me to go for bigger venues in the future, you know? Leave people wanting more.”
Since releasing her first EP in 2022, Judeline has caught the attention of fellow acts like Rosalía, Caroline Polachek, J Balvin, and Joe Jonas, who shared the song “Heavenly” on his Instagram stories shortly after the release of Bodhiria. “I went wild. I was so excited,” Judeline says, recounting the experience. (Since then, the two have met up in Paris, documented on their social media, for an impromptu guitar session at a cafe.)
Now, her music and intimate live show are about to attract even more eyes as Judeline is set to make her Coachella debut on US soil this weekend. For Judeline, performing at the festival feels like a fever dream, one she’s looked at from afar since childhood and that has, finally, started materializing before her eyes, one step at a time.
Born Lara Fernández in Caños de Meca, a small village in the coastal province of Cádiz, Judeline knew what she wanted to do from a young age. She began writing songs at the age of six. Her first original song, called “Pequeño Lucero,” meaning “Little Bright Star,” was dedicated to a pet she lost growing up. “I was like, ‘The dog is dead, f*ck everything,” she quips, adding that she actually doesn’t know the reason behind the pet’s sudden disappearance. “I have a video. My father sent it to me the other day,” Judeline shares, pulling up the clip of her tiny self, same face but blonder because of the exposure to sea salt and sun. She is sitting next to her dad, who’s playing the guitar, singing lyrics about longing and loss, using the moon as a metaphor, a motif that is still present in her oeuvre.
“Every time people would come over, [my dad would] be like, ‘Lara, show them your song,’” she recounts with a smile. The singer recalls making “stupid” songs as a child, converting school rhyming exercises into lyrics, and using music mnemonics to study for tests.
“I always knew I would work in a creative field, so I just took it step by step,” she says. “I was always messing around on YouTube, trying to find out about how artists lived. What’s a manager, what do they do, what’s a record label? I was looking up everything on the internet before I started taking it seriously. I was hoping something would happen, but I was always making a move.”
At 13, Judeline set up a punk rock band. She was the singer. When the bassist left, she told herself she’d step and learn bass to cover both roles. “I didn’t learn sh*t,” she scoffs. “I am a really bad learner.” After the band, she started uploading solo songs and covers to YouTube and Soundcloud, always thinking in the back of her mind that it’d be the thing that made her make it.
Then, she found out you could study arts during the two last years of high school, and the sky opened up. “I was like, ‘Ok, when I turn 16, that’s what I’m going to do,’” she says. With that in mind and still as a minor, she made the move to Madrid on her own and signed up for a two-year Spanish arts baccalaureate. “I didn’t do sh*t. I didn’t attend any classes. I didn’t do anything,” she says now, again cracking up. Instead, she used her now privileged location to sneak into jam sessions and studios, building up her contacts.
Soon she found her main producer duo, Mayo and Tuiste, as well as Rusia IDK members Drummie, Ralphie Choo, and Rusowsky, all of whom are credited in Bodhiria alongside Grammy award winner Rob Bisel, whose name you might recognize from SZA’s SOS, Doja Cat’s Planet Her, and Tate McRae’s Think Later.
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The 12-track EP, narrated from the gaze of the artist’s alter-ego, Angel-a, features everything from hazy voice memos and reimagined lullabies and prayers to traditional Venezuelan folk music. (Judeline’s father was raised in Venezuela and plays the cuatro, which he also taught her, in the scurried “Joropo.”)
Judeline infuses the project with a sort of mysticism from her Andalusian roots, combining quasi-ecclesiastical sounds with ethereal autotunes and synths to create her very own heterodox pop mix. Her murmured honeyed vocals and muted percussion are guiding threads.
“Luna Roja” and “bodhitale” hold a special place in Judeline’s heart, and she takes no time to admit it. “Of course, I love them all, but I feel those two songs really encapsulate what the album is about for me,” she says. “I listened to the demo for those two the most while working on the album, so they really transport me to Bodhiria.”
Bodhiria, as the singer has explained in the past, is her name (derived from a Buddhist word) for a transient metaphysical space, almost like a limbo or purgatory, where the protagonist is ostracized, stuck between suffering and rebirth, love and heartbreak, longing for her lover to remember her.
Much like her album is conceptual, so are her shows. For the Bodhiria tour, Judeline wanted the whole thing to feel more like performance art than a traditional concert. Under the creative vision of choreographer Candela Capitán, the star emerges on stage swinging from a massive pyramid made of stainless steel pipes. The familiar image evokes memories of childhood, but as dancers crawl beside her, the image becomes eerie. The star is joined by her onstage “shadow,” dancer Héctor Fuertes, taking the theatricality to the next level. Judeline marches on Fuertes’s back, leaving the innocence behind to interpret Angel-a’s story, only returning to the swing momentarily for the spellbinding “Heavenly.” All throughout the show, she’s in a circular non-verbal dialogue with Fuertes — pushing, pulling, relinquishing, and even freezing time while interacting with him.
“I met Héctor when he was walking fashion week in Madrid, and his presence is just undeniable,” Judeline says. “His demeanor is so strong, and he makes these faces on stage that you just can’t help but remember. They stuck with you. He worked a lot with Candela Capitán, who did the creative direction for the show. I asked her if we could include him because I had this idea of the show being a constant interaction between two people, and he was on board.”
After being on the road together for three months, Judeline considers Fuertes one of her closest friends. “He’s a really important person for me at the moment,” she says. “He’s coming to Coachella.”
Judeline first found out she was playing Coachella well before her tour started or had materialized in any form. “We went to LA, and I met a few people that worked at the festival, and just by the way they approached us and the way our conversation went, I had a feeling they could be considering me,” she recounts. “Sometime later, they told me I was playing, and I just flipped out. I had to keep it to myself until the lineup was announced. I mean, I told my mom, my boyfriend, and all that, but yes, it was incredible.”
During weekends one and two of Coachella 2025, Judeline is set to take the festival’s Sonora stage in one of the earliest slots in the evening. “It’s a really small stage, so I’m not going to be able to do a lot of changes or wild things, even if I wanted to, because it’s really limited, but I’m going to try and bring something intimate and special,” she says. Expect some changes to the instrumental arrangements alongside what Judeline does best, no matter the stage: an immersive, theatrical performance you can’t look away from.
“Maybe I’ll also bring a little present,” she teases. “If you need a little of Andalusia at Coachella, come to my set and unwind for a bit. It’s going to be fun.”
