MON LAFERTE - Femme fatale

Another album, another change of costume. Firmly determined never to repeat herself, to reinvent and push herself one step further, if only to marvel at how fragile limits can turn out to be, a little over two years after the remarkable "Autopoiética", the Latin American pop firebrand Mon Laferte returns with "Femme Fatale", a wholly different album, certainly driven by the same emotional drive that has inspired the entire career of the musician from Viña del Mar, but shifted back several decades from her recent explorations. Slipping into the role of a jazz chanteuse, the artist carries her passionate interpretive gift into a setting tailored to bring out every one of its facets, in drama and tedium, in torment and regret. Never before in her career have persona and performer become such an inseparable whole.

Even if the makeup and styling betray the artifice at play, Laferte's vocal intensity is such that you forget the eyeshadow and the wig, the smoke and the anachronisms, and get swept into her world of tears and abandonment, of live fire and icy memories. Into the Latin continuum that has animated every era of the musician's discography, this latest chapter fits naturally: the Chilean's jazz emerges from a crucible where the ideas of the classic canción melodica coexist with the more romantic forms of the cebolla that so animated the run of records in the mid-2010s, along with the refinement of the bolero. Everything Laferte needs to weave her web, enchanting in the strength of the confessions she knows how to hold back: from the smoky tone of the title track, a song to the moon in which the musician calls herself "experta en el arte del sabotear", through the bluesy guitars of the violent portrait of a man in "Mi hombre" and the raw passion of "Eso es amor" (the first of many features appearing on the tracklist), the musician's fire scorches even the darkest scenes, embodying emotional abandon with a power that takes no prisoners.

We are far removed from the affected irony, the gallant detachment of other iconic names in contemporary vocal jazz; here we're talking instead about love as revolution, about cities lived through the force of inner epic (the electric elegance, somewhat Cécile McLorin Salvant-like, of "Veracruz"), treating, at the slowed-down pace of a cumbia, "El gran señor" as the squalid abuser he is, breaking the rhythm by bursting into a tight spoken-word passage, where piano and double bass wrap around the story like a brutal slam-poetry performance. And if love is tyranny, you might as well find a trusted friend with whom to share the pains of such a yoke: alongside a Nathy Peluso who delivers here one of the performances of her career, the barreling cha-cha-cha of "La tirana" draws out all the desire, all the awareness inherent in a problem with no apparent solution, bound to a figure too elusive to be real.

We move on to idealizing old jazz clubs, until loneliness presents us with the bill (“Hasta que nos despierta la soledad”), creeping into the venues of the old Brill Building (“Melancolía”), until reaching the ideal culmination of so much torment, a wedding staged as a folk-pop romance, alongside two heavyweights of Mexican song, Natalia Lafourcade and Silvana Estrada (“My One And Only Love”).

What matters, after so many tears and so many cigarettes, is finally coming to accept oneself, wrinkles and all, to find the thread again, to try to be the mother she has always wanted to be. Once the drama-queen guise is shed, the poses of the character worn throughout the record, what remains is a furrowed brow, a creeping anxiety, permeating the aching drive toward a “Vida normal”. That the most heavily loaded arrangement should convey this impulse comes as no surprise: even on a lyrically more restrained track, the showgirl never fails to throw her full weight around. Life and art, beneath tons of eyeshadow.

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05/02/2026