In 'Repitiendo Promesas', Candu Domínguez Makes You Wait 51 Seconds

Candu Domínguez holds the storm back for 51 seconds. 'Repitiendo Promesas', the single she premiered on YouTube on the night of 8 October in Argentina, opens on a piano so quiet that our loudness meter puts it at 0.08 of the song's peak. Her voice comes in at 13.7 seconds over almost nothing. Then the chorus arrives at 0:51, more than two and a half times as loud as the first lines of the song, and the backing swells into something our sound classifier can only call electronic theme music. Four hours after the premiere the video had 3,702 views, 630 likes and 101 comments.

Four singles for Universal in eleven weeks

Candu Domínguez is an Argentine singer whose own channel describes her music as Latin pop with urban sounds. She has been busy this year: Deezer lists more than twenty releases since January, many of them live sessions. In July she started putting out singles through Universal Music Argentina, about four weeks apart. 'Que Vuelva Él' came on 24 July and has 851,986 views on YouTube; 'Que Ironía (Juntos #1)' followed on 21 August (290,314); the cumbia 'Toda La Vida' came on 18 September (170,343). Neither of the later two has caught the first. FloyyMenor in Chile has the same problem on a bigger scale, as our review of his new single 'Off The Planet' found this week. She also has a date to sell: a show at the Teatro Gran Ituzaingó, outside Buenos Aires, on 26 November.

'Repitiendo Promesas' lyrics: promises that sound the same

The title means 'repeating promises', and the song knows how that sounds. She opens by apologising, not wanting to disrespect him with things she has said before and is now saying again, and swears to give him a life she never gave anyone. The chorus admits the problem straight after the title, “Que aunque suenen iguales”: though these promises sound like the old ones, they are not worth the same. In his arms, she sings, there is no room for selfishness.

The rest of the chorus is about letting go. She has put the sadness down, she will love him from head to toe, and she ends on “Sin sentirme presa nunca más”, without feeling like a prisoner ever again, the line the whole song also closes on. The second verse calls what came before an old story, a wrong chapter she never learned from; he brings her water from the river, and when he makes her laugh, the forgetting is washed away. It is a song about making up, from someone asking to be believed again.

Piano first, then the flood

Our listening software split the 3:06 video into eleven passages. The first 51 seconds are piano and voice, which the classifier hears as a lullaby: the opening sits at 0.08 on our loudness scale and the first verse between 0.23 and 0.45. The chorus jumps to 0.77, with the title sung over a far bigger, electronic backing. The second verse drops back and brings in bowed strings, cello and double bass to the classifier's ear, before the second chorus from 1:46 to 2:24 at 0.75. A short orchestral passage follows. The last 32 seconds of the video are close to silence, with sounds the classifier takes for a door sliding and slamming; the streaming version runs 3:05, almost exactly as long.

Fifty-one seconds

The shape suits a short video: a quiet confession, then one big lift to cut to. Her first listeners are unusually involved, with likes from 17 percent of the viewers in the first four hours, and a label is now behind the monthly releases. The risk is those same 51 seconds. On streaming services, where listeners skip early, a near-silent opening is a long time, and fans who came for the cumbia of 'Toda La Vida' get a slow ballad instead.

Our prediction: the ballad outruns the cumbia. 'Repitiendo Promesas' passes 170,343 views on YouTube, the total 'Toda La Vida' has after three weeks, by 31 October.