The Cat Lady is a Dominican alternative rock band. It came together in Santo Domingo in September 2015 — Giancarlo Simó Fatule on vocals and guitar, Alberto Bustamante on bass and Richard Ball on drums — out of nothing more complicated than wanting to play rock with friends.

Rock in a country that dances

They arrived into a small scene and became one of its most celebrated names. Dominican alternative rock has never had the infrastructure merengue and bachata have, and a band that lasts a decade in it is doing something the market is not helping with.

Not Ready, written around 2014 with the band’s first bass player, was the first song they made. The If You Say So EP came out of those early years, and by 2017 the foreign press had noticed: NYLON put them on a list of Dominican musicians worth hearing.

Music, art and mental health

They describe what they do as music, art and mental health, and they mean it as a working brief rather than a slogan. Rorschachs, the album named after the inkblot test, is built as an examination of contemporary madness — the record goes at the subject directly instead of using it as atmosphere.

They have played the Premios Indie Dominicano, the awards that exist precisely because the mainstream Dominican prizes have little room for this kind of music.

Two cities

Simó settled in Bogotá and Bustamante stayed in Santo Domingo, and the band kept working as though the distance were a detail. They have been recording new material in Spanish, after a catalogue built largely in English.

Their own summary of the move is better than any paraphrase: the fishbowl had got too small.