‘Dangerous for being free’: Mon Laferte calling out injustice as the biggest star of Chile | Pop and rock

MLaferte has a sore throat. In the middle of our conversation, in a windowless studio at Sony’s offices above Madison Square Park in New York, singer Norma Monserrat Bustamante Laferte gently asks her boss for a lactose-free latte, or coconut milk, if she has any. It’s the first warm day of spring. She is in the middle of Latin American arenas on her Femme Fatale tour. Tonight, she’ll be walking through Manhattan with thick eyelashes and a Marilyn Monroe wig for a photo shoot. The Dead Woman music video. Today, her hair is dyed red, cut in Marcel’s waves. She is wearing a black slip dress and elegant, strappy tabis.

With a career spanning two decades, Laferte has more Latin Grammys than any other Chilean singer and is the world’s biggest streaming star, with over 18m monthly listeners. In October 2025, Laferte released her tenth album, Femme Fatale, a jazzy track that saw her enter a vampy alter ego; this month sees the continuation of this story with his companion album Femme Fatale Vol 2. As an archetype, his vision of pop stardom is biting with design. “The archetype is dangerous, isn’t it? It’s dangerous because it’s free, safe,” he tells me in Spanish. “Femme Fatale is the name the press gave me.”

Embracing taboos is Laferte’s punk culture. In 2019, amid a period of civil unrest and police brutality in Chile, Laferte. appeared on the Latin Grammys carpet in a green bandana, a symbol of abortion rights and reproductive rights in Latin America, with a message written on his bare chest: “In Chile they torture, rape and kill” (“In Chile they torture, rape and kill”). Her actions were heavily criticized by the local media; she has said she threw herself to the lions. “When I look back today, I think it was very important,” she says.

Laferte grew up in Viña del Mar, Chile. He sang in the town as a teenager to support his working-class family and, in 2003, became a national star after appearing in Chile’s Rojo Fama Contrafama, a competition TV show. In 2007, after moving to Mexico City, he sang on street corners and in subway stations and walked hours every week to party. Veracruz. Leaning on a twee sound saw him break out in 2015 with the album Mon Laferte, Vol 1, which went quadruple platinum in his home country. There are YouTube videos from that time that show Laferte’s courage in action, singing with his guitar and his son singing about his great sadness in the park or university method.

Femme Fatale Vol 2 deviated from the jazz of Vol 1, allowing her to revisit her old indie-folk sound with a fondness. On the new song Eterno Resplandor De Una Mente Sin Recuerdos by Chilean singer Javiera Electra, the two women draw a sympathetic guitar and lyrics about a street corner in Mexico City’s Roma Norte or a song by Luis Alberto Spinetta. It sounds like it could have been written on an afternoon tune in the 20s when you were wasting your day, sung a few years later in a forgiving register.

Both albums started in the same place: Mon’s notes app. He went through decades of unrecorded old music, and wrote more than 50 to bring it back. He says he’s attracted to “those who are so honest, they talk so stupidly that it’s hard for me to say, you know?”

Citing the forces of capitalism, neoliberalism, and the audience as both her supporters and her enemies, Femme Fatale Vol 2 begins with Laferte reversing the contradictions that occur in her performance, her work, and her music itself. “I don’t like to admit / that I became something important,” he sings in Spanish while passing buses, before seeing the funny side: “Don’t ask me to agree!” There is no solution, just enjoy, scatter.

He describes Femme Fatale Vol 1 and 2 as a complete body of work that “is completely feminist, not planning to make a feminist album.” On Por La Gracia De Dios, she honors women who have been criticized for defending their lives beastthe dangerous place of freight trains in Central America that thousands of people endure each year on their way to the United States. On the free jazz track, slightly edited at 1:30, he remembers himself being beaten and remembering himself. “It’s (one) of the things that cost me a lot of money to say,” he says. “Because it’s my life and my stories, from a young age. And it ends up being political.”

“I believe in feminism, even though it has been tarnished, and its name has been defamed,” she says. “You say, ‘I’m a feminist,’ and it’s like: ‘You’re bad,’ or ‘You’re dangerous.'” She laughs a little at the melodrama. “I think it’s important to keep talking about respecting women. Female it helps us all, doesn’t it?” He says. “It’s not a bad thing.”

A few years earlier, he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which he says helps him keep his mind off his writing. On the new song Hello Monserrat, he tells himself that he has to talk about botox, drugs and taxes besides his relationship with his mother. “Sometimes I get into this emotional state where I get a lot of inspiration,” he says. I feel everything when I’m there, and then when I sit down, I look back and even though it wasn’t all right, there’s something really beautiful.

Laferte’s life now seems very different from that of his protagonist. “In life, I’m … zero femme fatale,” she laughs. They live in Tepoztlán, a town about an hour and a half outside of Mexico City. He spends his days in a bun with a washed face. She loves plants, she loves cooking, she loves drawing and playing with her son. “I am a lady who likes to go to, I don’t know, Ikea.”

“Norma every day, I’m a disaster,” he insists. “I’m very lucky because I have it normal life. I go to my town, nobody recognizes me, nobody talks to me, I can go to the grocery store. I swear to you, I even ride the metro in Mexico City. No one recognizes me. Because without my Mon clothes, I’m free.

After that, I remember Latest TikTok sent an apology to a fan who recognized her at the quinceañera store while buying a tiara for her dress. He felt guilty; he told the fan that he was not Mon Laferte. And he wasn’t, not exactly. “I have this double life between Superman and Clark Kent,” he laughs. “That’s good.”