Between her breakout role as Cha Cha in The Shards and the arrival of her debut EP Siren Songs, the actor, dancer, and singer-songwriter is turning years of ambition, heartbreak, journals, and late-night dreaming into a multidisciplinary coming-of-age story.
There is a strange moment in the life of almost every young artist when pretending stops being pretend.
You spend years rehearsing the future.
Imagining the stage.
Learning the choreography.
Writing songs nobody has heard.
Playing characters.
Watching movies about people whose lives seem impossibly larger than yours.
Standing in rehearsal rooms and dorm bedrooms and wondering whether the distance between wanting something and becoming it can ever actually close.
Then, gradually—and sometimes all at once—the fantasy starts resembling your real life.
For Bella Valdes, that threshold arrives at an unusually concentrated moment.
Audiences are discovering her as Cha Cha in FX’s The Shards. Her short film Shuga Mango, an exploration of Cuban American life in Miami, premiered at the Greenpoint Film Festival. At the same time, Valdes is returning to music with “Playing Pretend,” a house-pop single built around the fantasies, sacrifices, heartbreak, and ambition of pursuing a life in the arts.
And behind it all waits Siren Songs, her forthcoming EP: a project whose origins stretch back to when Valdes was a 17-year-old freshman in New York City, alone with a newly purchased guitar, a journal, and the songs of artists like Phoebe Bridgers and Mitski.
The result is less a sudden introduction than the public arrival of a creative identity Valdes has been quietly assembling for years.
Actor.
Dancer.
Singer-songwriter.
Visual storyteller.
None of those disciplines exist entirely separately in her world.
Instead, they seem to orbit the same question:
What happens when the life you spent imagining begins to become real?
The Fantasy Before the Career
“Playing Pretend” is an appropriate first statement for this new musical chapter because its title contains the contradiction at the center of artistic ambition.
Before there is a career, there is usually imagination.
A child dances alone and imagines an audience.
A teenager writes songs in a bedroom and hears arrangements that do not yet exist.
An actor rehearses acceptance speeches for roles they have not booked.
A young artist walks through New York and quietly inserts themselves into the stories happening around them.
Pretending is often dismissed as childish.
For artists, it can be rehearsal.
“Playing Pretend” examines what happens when that fantasy becomes more complicated.
Wanting a life in the arts means wanting the beautiful parts.
Performance.
Expression.
Recognition.
Movement.
Connection.
But it also means confronting uncertainty, rejection, sacrifice, competition, instability, and the possibility that becoming the person you dreamed of might require surrendering parts of the life you imagined along the way.
Valdes places that contradiction inside house-pop rather than treating ambition exclusively as anguish.
The track moves.
That matters.
This is not a funeral for youthful fantasy.
It is the sound of entering it with clearer eyes.
From Dreaming of the Star to Becoming Her
The visual world of “Playing Pretend” makes that transformation literal.
Created with choreographer and creative partner Brooke Valdes, the music video draws inspiration from Flashdance and A Chorus Line—two works inseparable from fantasies of performance, discipline, sacrifice, and the overwhelming desire to be chosen.
Those references are especially fitting for Bella because dance is not an accessory to her musical persona.
It is part of the grammar through which she understands performance.
The visual traces an evolution from dreaming about becoming a star to inhabiting that identity herself.
That narrative could easily become triumphalist.
Instead, the song’s focus on sacrifice complicates it.
The fantasy of becoming an artist often centers around arrival.
You get the role.
You release the song.
You step onto the stage.
You become visible.
But very little is said about how strange visibility can feel once it happens.
The person who dreamed the life does not disappear when the dream starts coming true.
She watches.
She remembers.
She compares the reality with the fantasy.
Valdes’ work becomes interesting precisely in that space between them.
Dance as Emotional Language
For a multidisciplinary artist, movement can communicate what neither acting nor songwriting can completely contain.
A lyric explains.
A facial expression implies.
A body reveals.
Valdes’ background in professional dance gives “Playing Pretend” a physical vocabulary that extends beyond conventional music-video choreography.
Dance becomes part of the narrative.
There is ambition in movement.
Repetition.
Discipline.
Exhaustion.
Control.
Release.
Every dancer understands that something which eventually looks effortless usually exists because of countless hours when it was anything but.
That makes choreography an unusually precise metaphor for Valdes’ larger career.
Audiences see the arrival.
The artist remembers the repetitions.
Cha Cha and the Power of Performance
That relationship between body and character also makes Valdes’ role as Cha Cha in The Shards feel particularly significant.
The FX series gives audiences another entry point into her work at the same moment her own music begins expanding outward.
For an artist with years of dance training, acting offers a different method of inhabiting another person.
Dance asks the body to tell the story.
Acting asks the performer to surrender to somebody else’s interior world.
Songwriting reverses the process.
There, the material frequently becomes personal.
Bella is not disappearing into a character.
She is deciding what parts of herself to reveal.
That movement—from character to self—is what makes Siren Songs particularly compelling as the next chapter.
The Artist Behind the Performer
If “Playing Pretend” is theatrical, Siren Songs promises something more intimate.
The EP is built from years of journals, songs, memories, and emotional fragments stretching back to Valdes’ arrival in New York as a teenager.
At 17, she entered college in the city and bought her first guitar.
At night, she began writing.
Artists like Phoebe Bridgers and Mitski became companions and reference points as Valdes discovered what songwriting could offer that her other disciplines could not.
Dance could externalize feeling.
Acting could transform it.
Songwriting allowed her to document it.
The songs that eventually became Siren Songs therefore did not emerge from a single recording period or creative concept.
They accumulated.
That distinction gives the project unusual emotional potential.
A song written close to an experience knows one kind of truth.
A person revisiting that experience years later knows another.
The EP occupies the distance between those two perspectives.
Seventeen and Looking Back
There is something particularly intense about beginning a creative archive at 17.
Everything feels definitive at that age.
The first heartbreak can feel like the final heartbreak.
The first great friendship feels permanent.
The first version of yourself that seems independent feels complete.
Ambition feels limitless because very little has yet had time to contradict it.
Then life does what it always does.
People leave.
Relationships shift.
Careers move unpredictably.
The city changes.
You change.
The person who wrote something at 17 may barely recognize the person reading it years later.
But the feeling remains preserved.
That is what makes old journals so disorienting.
They confront us with former versions of ourselves who believed things with complete sincerity that we may no longer believe at all.
Siren Songs revisits those emotions without erasing either perspective.
The younger Bella gets to feel everything with full intensity.
The present-day Bella gets to understand what happened next.
Between them sits the record.
The Seduction of the Dream
Even the title Siren Songs feels appropriate for an artist examining ambition.
In mythology, the siren calls you toward something irresistible.
You know there may be danger.
You move toward it anyway.
Few metaphors better describe a life in the arts.
People enter entertainment careers despite understanding the instability.
They audition despite rejection.
They release music despite knowing it may disappear into an endless stream of content.
They spend years training for opportunities that can vanish in an afternoon.
They move cities.
Sacrifice stability.
Miss ordinary milestones.
Continue.
Because something keeps calling.
“Playing Pretend” examines the fantasy of the artistic life.
Siren Songs expands the question:
What if the dream itself is the siren?
Heartbreak, Ambition, and the Price of Becoming
Valdes’ new music places romantic and professional longing close together.
That makes sense.
Ambition and heartbreak are not as unrelated as they initially appear.
Both are organized around desire.
Both force you to confront what happens when wanting something does not guarantee having it.
Both can make you construct elaborate futures.
Both can destabilize identity when reality diverges from those futures.
And both ask a difficult question afterward:
Who are you when the thing you wanted changes—or when you finally get it?
“Playing Pretend” is interested in the cost of choosing the artistic life.
Siren Songs appears poised to examine the person who made those choices.
That is a more interesting story than uncomplicated success.
Making the Record With People Who Remember the Beginning
The EP was written and produced alongside Thomas Moro Sanders, Carter Bannwarth, and Aleksei Laziç, close friends and longtime collaborators whose connection to the project stretches back to college.
That history changes the meaning of collaboration.
These are not simply musicians brought into a room to complete a record.
They are people connected to the period the record is excavating.
The project becomes, in part, the realization of a creative dream they once shared before knowing what shape their careers would take.
There is something beautifully circular about that.
Young artists often make plans together with an almost reckless certainty.
We’ll make the record.
We’ll make the film.
We’ll move to New York.
We’ll create something together.
Most of those promises disappear into adulthood.
This one survived long enough to become an EP.
When Several Careers Happen at Once
Valdes enters this musical era at a moment when her career could easily be described through another medium entirely.
She is a recent NYU Tisch graduate.
She has appeared in Law & Order: SVU.
Her theatrical background includes American Psycho.
The Shards gives her a prominent television role.
Shuga Mango expands her film work.
Then comes the EP.
There is a temptation to describe this as balancing several careers.
But perhaps the more interesting interpretation is that Valdes does not see them as separate.
The same instincts keep resurfacing.
Character.
Emotion.
Movement.
Narrative.
Visuality.
Performance.
The medium changes.
The storytelling impulse does not.
The Multidisciplinary Artist Is Not Indecisive
Artists who work across disciplines are sometimes treated as though they will eventually have to choose their “real” identity.
Actor or musician?
Dancer or singer?
Performer or songwriter?
That framework increasingly feels obsolete.
For Valdes, the disciplines strengthen one another.
Dance teaches control over physical storytelling.
Acting teaches inhabitation.
Songwriting demands emotional authorship.
Visual direction teaches how those emotions become worlds.
One medium exposes the limitations of another.
Then the artist learns how to move between them.
“Playing Pretend” makes that interconnectedness unusually visible because its music, choreography, cinematic references, and lyrical ideas all address the same experience from different directions.
From Character to Confession
This may ultimately be the most compelling transition in Valdes’ current chapter.
On television, an audience meets Cha Cha.
In film and theater, Bella inhabits stories already larger than herself.
Then music asks her to remove some of that protection.
The forthcoming EP promises an introduction not merely to Bella Valdes the performer, but to the experiences that existed before anyone was watching.
Dorm rooms.
Journals.
First songs.
Relationships.
Ambition.
Growing pains.
The fantasies that preceded the career.
The private archive behind the public performer.
That is what makes the timing so interesting.
Just as more people are beginning to recognize her face, she is releasing work designed to reveal the person behind it.
A Siren Does Not Force You to Follow
There is another way to understand the siren metaphor.
The danger was never simply that the song existed.
The danger was that somebody wanted to follow it.
Desire creates the journey.
Bella Valdes has spent much of her life following artistic impulses that could have led almost anywhere.
Dance led toward acting.
Acting expanded performance.
Music waited in notebooks.
Songs written as a teenager survived long enough to enter a studio.
Collaborators remained collaborators.
A fantasy slowly accumulated evidence.
And eventually, “playing pretend” stopped being an accurate description.
Becoming the Person You Used to Imagine
The most interesting coming-of-age stories rarely end with the protagonist discovering exactly who they are.
They end when the protagonist understands that becoming is continuous.
That feels particularly appropriate for Bella Valdes.
At 17, she could imagine an artistic life.
Now she is living inside one.
But living the dream does not eliminate uncertainty.
It simply changes the questions.
The fantasy becomes work.
The role becomes responsibility.
The audition becomes the job.
The private song becomes public.
And the girl who once imagined becoming a performer eventually has to decide what kind of artist she actually wants to be.
Siren Songs arrives from inside that transition.
It collects the emotional evidence of one version of Bella and places it in the hands of another.
The teenager writes.
The adult revisits.
The dancer moves through it.
The actor understands character.
The singer gives it a voice.
And the songwriter finally gets the last word.
“Playing Pretend” may introduce Bella Valdes’ new musical era through the fantasy of becoming a star.
But Siren Songs asks a more intimate question:
Who are you once the fantasy starts coming true?
That answer cannot be choreographed perfectly.
It cannot be rehearsed forever.
At some point, the curtain rises.
And you have to stop pretending.
