Born to a Dominican mother and Mexican father in New Jersey, 21-year-old Ambar
Lucid grew up just a stone’s throw away from the hustle and bustle of New York
City in the quiet suburbia of Little Ferry, where she spent her youth day-dreaming
of a brighter future.
After watching her dad get deported to Mexico when she was a little kid, a traumatic
experience that cast a shadow over her childhood, Ambar was shuffled back and
forth between the Dominican Republic to stay with her grandmother. After finally
landing back in NJ permanently at the age of 8, she was often called upon to watch
over her younger siblings at home while her mom worked. Seeking an escape from
the daily hardships of life, she found refuge in pop artists such as Lady Gaga, Kesha,
Bruno Mars, and her “idol” Selena Gomez. “All I really had to entertain myself was
pop culture,” she says of years spent watching pop music videos, artist interviews,
and concert footage on YouTube.

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ambar knew at a young age that she wanted to make music
professionally someday, something that gave her a sense of comfort and hope when
she needed it most. However, her complicated upbringing and where she came from,
as she tells it, made it seem like a “very unrealistic thing to want to be an artist.”
Undeterred, she convinced herself that music was her destiny: At school she joined
clubs such as chorus and band, and started learning how to play the ukulele and
piano. At age 11, she started teaching herself how to play the guitar with the help of
YouTube tutorials and instructional DVDs because, as she recalls, “I was a huge
One Direction fan and wanted something to bond over with Niall Horan.”
Around the same time, she began uploading song covers to YouTube, but it wasn’t
until she went through her first real breakup at the age of 15 that she realized she had
her own unique stories to share. “It was my first real breakup. I was really sad and
needed some kind of outlet to release what I was feeling,” she explains. “The idea
to write a song popped into my head and I was like, ‘I've been playing guitar for so
long, why have I never written my own song?” Curling up in her bathtub (“probably
for that reverb”), Ambar strummed the pain away on her guitar and recorded the
song in a voice memo. In that moment, she officially became a singer-songwriter in
her own right.
Not long after, she began uploading her original songs to SoundCloud—folk-tinged,
bilingual indie pop and R&B tracks tackling the hopelessness and sadness that teens
often face in today’s complex world. Songs such as “A letter to my younger self”
and “Mar de Llanto'' allowed Ambar to navigate her struggle with depression and
the feeling that even her loved ones thought she was “crazy” for following her
dreams. Over time, a passionate fanbase began to grow organically, with her songs
offering both Ambar and her listeners a sense of catharsis, solidarity, and belonging.
In her later teens, Ambar’s sonic palette began to expand past the shiny world of
pop she’d been so obsessed with as a kid. Soon, she discovered psychedelic rock, a
genre that “changed the game” for her. But it was Pink Floyd’s iconic 1973 album,
The Dark Side of the Moon, that helped her realize the special power that music had:
“I realized music can not only make you feel good, but it can literally make you feel
like you're in outer space. It changed the kind of experience I wanted to create for
people. I realized I wanted to make music that would impact people in that way, like
they're not on planet Earth or that they're more than what they are in that moment.”
Coupled with what Ambar refers to as a “conscious spiritual journey,” this
psychedelic discovery sparked a new evolution in Ambar’s sound and aesthetic,
creating a whole new world for the dynamic artist: a rainbow-hued cosmic realm of

 

flowers, mushrooms, faeries, and butterflies, all enveloped in a soundscape of
soulful vocals, trippy psych-rock, and lush electronics as heard on her transcendent
Garden of Lucid album, released in 2020. Her lead single “Fantasmas” from this
album received praise by the highly acclaimed Netflix show Élite, where Ambar
made her debut appearance as an actor with a mystical performance of the song as
the center of the episode.
Ambar has since embraced a new alter ego, Estrella, that was birthed while working
on her forthcoming sophomore album. Lucid describes Estrella as “the bold and
confident woman I am becoming, fully embracing and owning my fluidity, identity,
and self-confidence.” In this new era, her released singles include “girl ur so pretty”,
a pop song that embraces Lucid’s sexuality and “La Torre”, heavily influenced by
the tower tarot card signifying dramatic and necessary change, as well as “444” and
“Ms. Moon”, both part of the album that take listeners on a journey into her alter
ego’s prismatic world.
She has amassed over 100 million streams across platforms, and her music and
artistic expression have captivated artists like Omar Apollo, Mon Laferte, and Cuco,
all who have given Ambar a supporting role in their respective tours. Since, Ambar
has accumulated her own following, enabling her to bring her Estrella alter ego to
life and create an immersive performance of her kaleidoscopic world, selling out her
own headline shows across North America. Ambar will embark on the “Estrella
Tour: Part 2” in the fall of 2023.
With more new music on the way, including a set of releases self-written and self-
produced to commemorate her evolution as an independent artist once again, Ambar
is on a mission to touch as many souls as she can through her inimitable sonic
storytelling. Above all, she just wants to manifest a little radical self-love and
empowerment with her music: “I'm healing our generational trauma.”