The Luisa Almaguer Experience Awaits
The Mexico City singer-songwriter—who conjures a phantasmagoric mix of psych-rock, folk, and cumbia—is as complex as the capital she calls home.
Going Up is a profile series featuring artists we love who are on the verge of breaking through.
“I can’t see shit, but I love you,” Luisa Almaguer says in Spanish to a cheering crowd blanketed in total darkness. She’s on a stage nestled in Mexico City’s historic Chapultepec Park, one of the most expansive urban oases on Earth. The park hosts more than 24 million guests annually, including Almaguer and her audience of a few hundred on a Saturday evening late last year.
At the free event, young fans and families clap in syncopated rhythms as a suited Almaguer and her band play the nine spectral tracks that make up her 2024 album Weyes. An experiment in genre versatility that braids elements of psych-rock, folk, shoegaze, and cumbia, creating a mood that oscillates between melancholy and chaos, the record marks the 33-year-old’s finest work to date. Fittingly, her musical influences are broad, from moody indie rockers like Beach House to the theatrical Argentinian singer and composer Liliana Felipe to Mexican pop icon Ely Guerra.
The glow of cigarettes and inconspicuous blunts dot the crowd, as Almaguer and her four-person band lean into the album’s lovelorn opener, which begins tenderly before breaking open into a fuzzed-out hook. “Un día nos vamos a morir y no me vas a poder querer,” she sings in her signature baritone with her eyes closed. One day we are going to die, and you’re not going to be able to love me.
It’s not just that one day we’re going to die. “Our life and our world is coming to an end,” Almaguer tells me days after her performance, underscoring the high-stakes drama inherent in her music and her personal life. “We are keeping each other company, for what? For dying. And that is no small thing.”
