Maripool’s lush “Favourite” pairs quiet intensity with pointed introspection

“You are my favourite one,” Natacha Simões, aka Maripool, first sings along to her swaying musical rumination. “You don’t even know it,” she repeats, a chorus of voices echoing behind her, as the intensity of her blend of shoegaze and indie pop rises. Her voice finally ends up screaming restlessly: “You don’t even know me!” Her concentrated, emotional directness continues in Rotten Luck, her debut album out 28 August, and “Favourite” is just one part of its broader journey through identity, memory, and returning to the past.

Simões has composed nostalgic melodies on her own for several years, committing her reflections to many EPs with a confessional songwriting pen similar to that of beabadoobee’s. Rotten Luck carries an expansiveness absent from her earlier work. For one, her live band lent their hands in the studio for the first time. “It was nice for them because they’ve played with me for ages and they’re very good,” Simões says. “Also, because they’ve played with me for so long, they know how I write and the things that I like.”

Yet the therapeutic undercurrent is what distinguishes her new album. On a whim, Simões returned to Lisbon in January 2025 for a month-long residency – the first time she’d lived there since moving to London – and wrote with no expectations. Her drab, cold surroundings were a stark contrast to the beautiful, glistening indie rock that emerged. She stayed in a decaying fisherman’s building across the river, with no Wi-Fi, broken windows, leaking ceilings from a big storm, while also having to play guitar with fingerless gloves. But those “surroundings were so beautiful” to Simões, and they nurtured an intriguing duality. “It was a very strange experience, but in a way it was quite nice because I think it’s better to be isolated to really process things,” she says.

The stillness and lack of distractions helped her focus on writing, treating it like a day job, and ironing out song structures before showing them to her bandmates back in London. An openness subconsciously crept through, too: the five-minute “Lucky Stars” is a standout on the record midway through, a confident instrumental that was the only song she planned. “I just find it interesting how on some instrumental songs, you can hear it, and they don’t need any lyrics to convey a feeling. I find that’s so powerful.” That Simões wrote it very quickly on the last day, and right before leaving, affirms the immediacy she harnessed this time.

Rotten Luck is also significant for her interrogation of the past through a diasporic lens. It was her return to Lisbon after many years of living in London that moved her so deeply. “While I was there, it affected me in the sense of like, being in London, it feels like there’s two versions of me,” Simões explains. “There’s the version of me that lives here, and the version of me that’s in Lisbon. So it was reconnecting with a version of me that I left behind.” It was also a full-circle moment for her, as she left Lisbon not knowing how to play any instruments, and returned as an accomplished musician: “This is something that I always wanted to do: Go back and use Lisbon to write the album.”

By examining the tension between who we are and where we come from, Rotten Luck sees Simões at her most realised, especially on the hooky lead single “Crossing” and the melancholic one-two punch conclusion of “Alone Tonight” and “Stuck”. The record is communal, as Simões no longer had to spend “10 hours of playing everything and still having to think about the production.” The collaboration with her band, funnily enough, gave her “more control,” even if she did less in the London studio: “I could actually think about what was being done.”

Most importantly, Rotten Luck represents her purpose of becoming a musician in the first place. “Sometimes when I listen to albums, I don’t exactly know what people have written them about, but then you kind of attach your own meaning to them,” she tells me. “Even if it’s not super obvious what it’s about, I hope people just attach their own meaning to Rotten Luck, and it gives them something.”