Toro Gato is sort of a brand new person, one that never quite existed before but has taken a lifetime to gestate into being. The person responsible for bringing Toro Gato to light is none other than former Vampire Diaries Star, Kat Graham.

Graham now Manifests the artist known as Toro Gato, blurring the line between the two, and even admitting to feeling more and more like Kat is the alter-ego while T.G. is the real "self".

It would be limiting to refer to Toro Gato simply as a musician. when she's clearly about breaking boundaries and exploring the reaches further beyond labels and expectations. The ongoing project that is Toro Gato can be a bit of an overwhelming experience at first, so overwhelming Gato confesses to "burying" the Graham persona in one of her short films, doing away with the friendly pop era, and announcing the coming of an experimental and more cinematic experience.

All of this information really comes to a head in the reveal of Toro Gato: Part II. The Self-titled release crystalizes the transition from Graham to Toro (or from kat to, Gato, i should say) and puts the innovativeness of the artist to the test by turning the entire endeavor into a constellation of expressions bound together into a "digital museum" of sorts accessible through and as NFTs.

Now hold on a second, in case you've been "living under a rock", and the acronym "NFT" doesn't mean anything to you, we are of course talking about "Non-Fungible Tokens", or digitally-available works of art or collectibles bound to unique and non-falsifiable identification codes and metadata which are registered through the digital ledger technology known as The Blockchain. This means that any given asset -regardless of however many copies can be made- can always be identified as "the one true original piece", and its owner will always have a way to prove their claim over it.

The Audio-visual album release is available through NYC-based blockchain musical marketplace YellowHeart, a platform which "is taking the blockchain's power to bulldoze the norms of selling tickets and art by creating anasset class that recognizes that buyers need a mechanism to irrevocably trace the provenance of a tradeable item, and creators should get paid a portion of all future profits derived from trading the work they created"

The "Toro Gato" NFT visual album collection - Availalbe HERE

The NFT album release has a total of 5 offerings for fans. Two Digital-only offerings that include seven unreleased singles, exclusive audiovisual content and the complete album (parts I and II). The three other offertings are an assortment of bundles that include the previously-mentioned digital releases plus physical medium (vinyls, cassettes) and even merch. For the first 30 days of the release, there's an iron-on patch freely available to fans who purchased Part I in september last year.

The music

The Toro Gato sound emerges from the primordial soup of Kat Graham as a more visually-oriented music project, both evocative of dreamy landscapes by itself, or more suited for the audiovisual medium. Toro's new trip-hop-infused style is more introspective and sweeping, taking an easy hold of the listener's visualization center of the brain and fertilizing the imagination with motion and scenery. This is immediately apparent from the stunning image that Toro Gato Projects, where music and conceptual fashion and arts bleed together to excite two of our strongest senses.

From the very first track ("Fall 4 U"), T.G establishes a flair for the dramatic and introspective. The string section invites a downtempo percussion and luxurious vocal performance into the fray, producing that moody and unabashed "cinematic" sound that we mentioned earlier.

The second track ("Red Skies") is almost a U-turn in a lot of ways, taking some hints from acid Jazz fusion and a much more exotic sound that, nonetheless, remains in the same dimension as the first. in broader terms, this is the "rhythm" of the album, as each song follows a cohesive style developed over (usually) radically-different sounds, no two tracks are quite alike, yet there's a method to the madness, resulting in what can be most appropriately described as a collage of inspired Oneiric melodies and some of the most ferocious songwriting I've heard in while.

When comparing songs like "Time" and "Sorry I shot ya", one can be wowed at the capacity and range of Toro Gato's Creative library. There's an experimental flavor to the whole album, but it's more for us -the listener- than it is for the artist, as the album's cohesiveness speaks to a lot of deliberate and confident choices of someone who has absolute faith in the work that they're putting out, so much so in fact, that sometimes the album can be full of elating and even danceable moments with a song like "Swim", while at other times, it can switch things completely into the field of deep melancholy and reflection with the hauntingly beautiful "The Unknown" (which is probably my personal favorite).

Perhaps the crowning jewel of the album lies in its finishing thesis statement.

The soulful "Work for your Love" is very aptly titled, and it falls on the more "conventional" side of things, sound-wise, and it fills a nice role in the whole scheme of things by allowing us to better appreciate the sprawling soundscape that Toro Gato's voice is capable of a building when accompanied with a relatively uncomplicated composition that stands between the R&B/Soul axis and the pop Powerballad paradigm. "Work For your Love" may be lyrically about a complicated romance, but there's some play even in those lyrics, and it wraps the album up nicely, as if saying "I've worked hard to build this", and we get to reciprocate this work of love with some love of our own.

The sheer breath of exhilirating and tasty new sounds Toro Gato delivers with each song brings a great deal of enjoyment in every regard, assuring us that there are no brakes on her train, and it's only a matter of time before the public at large gets clued in to her enormous talents. There is no song that did not feel incredibly satisfying to listen to, no moment where one can be certain you've "heard it all".

Toro Gato: The Artist | The Innovator | The new Album.

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