Princesas
Pereza
How to study this song
Learning “Princesas” means 61 entries at A1+ — 23 Spanish words, 3 adjectives and 35 verb forms, every one taken from what the song actually says. The glossary is the place to begin — sonrisa, bar and calada are the song’s keywords. This one leans on its verbs: 35 distinct forms against 3 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.
The words of this song, in several languages
Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.
Vocabulary
| ES | EN | IT | FR | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| sonrisa | smile | sorriso | sourire | sorriso | glimlach | Lächeln |
| bar | bar | bar | bar | bar | café | Kneipe |
| calada | drag | tiro | taffe | passa | trekje | Zug |
| película | film | film | film | filme |
What this song teaches you
Level · A1+
- Vocabulary words
- 23
- Adjectives
- 3
- Word combos
- 16
- Expressions
- 9
- Verb forms
- 37
- Quiz questions
- 35
Background
About the song
«Princesas» («Princesses») is a song by Pereza, the rock band from Madrid led by Rubén Pozo and Leiva. It belongs to «Animales», the group's third studio album, which came out in the spring of 2005, and it was released as a single from that record. Together with «Todo», the single that followed it, «Princesas» is the song that, in the words of the Spanish-language Wikipedia, put Pereza on the map of commercial radio in Spain. More than twenty years later it is still the title most people associate with the band.
The story of Pereza starts in the late nineties in Alameda de Osuna, a neighbourhood in the east of Madrid. In 1998 a group of young friends began meeting to play cover versions of Leño, the legendary Madrid rock band of the early eighties. Rubén Pozo, who had just left the group Buenas Noches Rose, joined them on guitar, and the band played its first concerts in the bars of Malasaña. A talent scout from RCA signed them, and their first album, simply called «Pereza», was released in 2001. With the second one, «Algo para cantar», Pereza became a duo of Rubén and Leiva and toured intensively, with some two hundred concerts by the band's own count and dates as the opening act for Bon Jovi.
«Animales» was a turning point. The album was produced by Nigel Walker, a British engineer and producer who had worked with Bob Dylan, Tom Petty and Aerosmith, and the band itself described it as a qualitative leap. The sound is electric rock with guitars at the front, but with clear pop melodies and choruses made to be sung by a crowd. «Princesas» is a good example of that balance: a fast, bright guitar riff, a simple structure and a chorus that is easy to remember after one listen.
The song was written by Leiva. In an interview given in 2025 to the podcast «El sentido de la birra», he explained that he wrote it when he was about twenty-one, while he was still living at his parents' house, and that it took him very little time to finish it. The narrator has just left a relationship behind and sounds relieved rather than sad. He spends his nights going out, laughing, chatting with strangers and dancing, and he insists that he does not want to hear any more about a certain kind of «princess»: a person who collects lovers as if they were trophies. In the end the former partner is presented as something that already belongs to the past.