The Luisa Almaguer Experience Awaits

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.”

She’s sitting in a friend’s apartment in Mexico City’s San Rafael neighborhood. We’re just a few blocks from where she used to record “La Hora Trans,” the first podcast made by and for trans people in Latin America. Almaguer teeters between hipper parts of town like this one, where she congregates among las modernas and los escenosos who frequently recognize her, and her home borough of Azcapotzalco—one of the oldest in Mexico City—where she goes incognito. “I am very grateful that I live in a place that the gringos and the gentrifying gang haven’t set their eyes on yet,” she says. 

Present-day Mexico City is a surreal place racked with inequalities and contrasts: a Haitian migrant encampment a few blocks away from the largest luxury Soho House in the Americas, imposing buildings on Reforma Avenue that shade the destitute, rows of food vendors next to glorified breakfast diners that serve chilaquiles for 500 pesos, or about $25, a plate. “I am used to the many things that might strike others as being absolutely impressive and bizarre,” Almaguer says. “But I have my own extremes and edges.” Though she’ll play her first international shows this year and has found herself collaborating with the likes of Damon Albarn, she is happy tending to her four dogs and frequenting the local street market where she still buys her shoes.

Much like the city that bleeds into her work, Almaguer is full of contradictions. Both in conversation and on stage, she is vociferous and jocular. For all her coolness, she can get nerdy about her love for the Marvel universe and the Alien franchise. “Spider-Man drives me crazy,” she gushes. “I love this possibility of imagining ourselves as these sexy and powerful beings.” She frequently jokes around to deflate some of the heavier subject matter that pervades her lyrics, such as violence, transphobia, and the failures of feminism. “Feminism is dead,” Almaguer teasingly told the crowd at the Chapultepec show. “All we have left is to be basic.” 

When I ask her what she meant by that, she laughs. In the late 2010s, there was a sense of liberation and effervescence that felt unique within Mexico’s contemporary history, but that moment has given way to a new type of feminism—one that Almaguer characterizes as “anti-poor, anti-puta, anti-Black, and anti-trans.” This ushered in an era of Barbie feminism, she tells me, marked by brand deals, politicians, and unnecessary policing that overlooks what matters most, such as class and privilege. To Almaguer, being basic is an antidote to facing the things one cannot change, and that’s OK, too.

It’s not just the collapse of feminism that led Almaguer towards the basic path. It’s also the unrelenting localized and universal violence, and the heartbreak. To Almaguer, violence can manifest itself in numerous forms, many of which are expressed as quotidian realities for most people in her country. Like the way some are forced to commute three hours on the subway to get home at night. Or the violence perpetrated by a policeman who decides which people can and cannot be admitted to a hospital, which Almaguer witnessed first-hand when she was trying to get care for her sick mother. The incident inspired Weyes’ macabre cumbia finale, “María.” “The type of violence that fucks up the most precarious people is the most bastardly violence of all,” she tells me. 

And then there are the weyes themselves—the male protagonists at the center of her album’s drama. This includes a chorus of men that have watched over or threatened Almaguer, those whom she has adored, wept over, and said goodbye to. She describes the record’s emotional arc as a “feeling of tenderness and love and desire that contrasts with the danger and violence and fear.” 

In Mexico, “wey” has many meanings. It can refer to a man and many men (un wey, unos weyes), or serve as a gender-neutral prefix for starting a conversation (Wey, ¿cómo has estado?) or a suffix for ending that conversation (¿Cómo has estado, wey?). It is also a way to tell someone that they’re stupid (no seas wey) and a shorthand for expressing pain or surprise (ay, ¡wey!). Sometimes, wey is purely onomatopoeic filler, something that lasts longer than a sigh: weeeeeeeeeey. Almaguer seems to contain all of the word’s expressions and intonations in the spoken-word interlude “Weyes,” a soliloquy in the shape of a voice note. 

Across the album, there are the weyes for which Almaguer modulates her voice when she’s stepping into a bus or an Uber, so as to avoid potentially dangerous confrontations. There’s also handsome Tío Hugo, a putative father to Almaguer who drove her to school when she was growing up. There’s Julián, her current partner and longest relationship to date. “We’re like husband and wife,” she says. There’s Santiago Mijares, who produced her album, and her bandmates, without whom she can’t imagine making another record.

Almaguer’s tender relationship with her band is acutely felt both on stage and off. During a rehearsal in the Roma Sur neighborhood in December, her keyboardist Carlos Bergen tells me, “I’ll cry one to two times every set, sometimes more.” This heightened response is what the band as a whole refers to as the “Luisa Almaguer Experience.” Though all of them work on music independently—guitarist Apache O’Raspi plays in the rock band Belafonte Sensacional, guitarist Aarón Bautista has his own experimental, eponymous project, while drummer André Cravioto and saxophonist Ernesto Havia play jazz together—Almaguer seems to have “touched on the sentimental fibers of their souls,” as Cravioto puts it. “This is a band with great sexual and zodiacal diversity,” Almaguer adds from a red couch.

Almaguer’s fans feel a similar sense of emotional resonance in her music. Though she scoffs at the suggestion that she is accruing any kind of fame (“Nobody knows who I am!”), Almaguer is learning how to navigate delicate conversations with her followers. Still, she warns, “I am not a therapist and I am also very sensitive.” After touring much of Mexico this year, she is aware that the trans experience is felt differently across states. “Being a trans person in Mexico City is not the same as being a trans person in Guanajuato,” she says, talking about the relatively conservative state. “There’s such a lack of spaces, projects, places, and attention to these communities that they are very grateful that we play for them.”

On this December day, as the smoky afternoon light filters through the rehearsal studio’s stained glass windows, Almaguer and her band are getting ready to play Mexico’s largest public square the following week. Insulated from the traffic of the Virgin of Guadalupe processions echoing throughout the city, Almaguer sings the first lines of “Amarga Navidad,” a ranchera originally written and performed by José Alfredo Jiménez, one Mexico’s most beloved artists and the father of the modern regional sound. With her eyes shut behind dark shades, Almaguer takes her hand to the mic and flips the bird to heartbreak while offering a prayer for the new year. “Diciembre me gustó pa' que te vayas, que sea tu cruel adiós mi Navidad,” she sings. “No quiero comenzar el año nuevo con ese mismo amor que me hace tanto mal.” December was a great month for you to leave. I don’t want to start the year with that same love who wronged me.