Mon Laferte

Biography

In 1992 a nine-year-old girl from Viña del Mar won a competition held by her school, the Orlando Peña Carvajal school, and was given a guitar as the prize. On it Norma Monserrat Bustamante Laferte composed her first songs.

She was born on 2 May 1983 in Viña del Mar, a port town near Santiago. She grew up with her mother, Myriam Laferte Herrera, her grandmother, who was also called Norma, and her younger sister, Solange. At thirteen she won a scholarship and studied for about a year and a half at the conservatory in her hometown, although she herself admitted that she preferred the self-taught path. She played in bars in Viña del Mar and Valparaíso. In 2003, still under the name Monserrat Bustamante, she came before the public as a contestant on the television talent show Rojo (Rojo fama contrafama) on Chile’s national television. She was taken into the show’s permanent company of singers and dancers, the so-called Clan Rojo, and in the same year she released her first album, “La chica de Rojo”, which went gold and platinum. Four years later, on 22 June 2007, she said goodbye to the programme on the stage of the Teatro Caupolicán in Santiago and left for Mexico. In Mexico City she sang in nightclubs and recorded cover versions, and at weekends travelled to Veracruz. In 2009 she was promoting the single “Lo mismo que yo”, which was meant to open a new album, but the record never came out. She changed her look and her name: the stage name “Mon Laferte” goes back to her mother’s surname. She explained the change this way: circumstances had changed her, and she needed to start from zero. “Desechable” came out in July 2011. In 2012 she sat on the jury of the second season of the Chilean “Factor X” and became the vocalist of the Mexican all-female metal band Mystica Girls, with whom she recorded “Gates of Hell” in February 2014. In between came “Tornasol” (2013) and a role as the singer Eli in the Peruvian comedy “Japy Ending”.

The album “Mon Laferte, Vol. 1” was released on 31 January 2015 in Santiago. In August it was released again on Discos Valiente, a division of Universal Music México, and the single “Tu falta de querer” became a hit in Mexico and Latin America. For its video she won an MTV Millennial Award for best Latin video. In 2016 she received two Latin Grammy nominations. In February 2017 she performed for the first time at the Viña del Mar International Song Festival, where the audience demanded a Platinum Seagull for her; according to accounts, the ceremony was halted for more than twenty minutes.

The album “La Trenza” (28 April 2017) was recorded in Mexico and Chile, and it carries traces of Chilean and Mexican folk music and Andean rhythms. Her duet with the Colombian singer Juanes, “Amárrame”, won her the Latin Grammy for best alternative song; she had five nominations in all. That year she also won the MTV Europe Music Awards prize for best North Latin artist.

The record “Norma” was made on 16 June 2018 in a single session at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles, without overdubbing, with thirteen musicians; the producer was Omar Rodríguez-López. In 2018 she directed her first video, for the song “Antes de ti”, and recorded a cover of “Feliz Navidad” with Gwen Stefani. For “Norma” she won the Latin Grammy for best alternative music album in November 2019. At the ceremony she appeared with a message written on her bare chest: “In Chile they torture, rape and kill.” Later Chilean prosecutors summoned her to give a statement about her remarks on the burning of metro stations in Santiago; the charges were later dropped. On 11 March 2020 her first exhibition, “Gestos”, with 76 works, opened at the Museum of the City of Mexico; she has painted for about ten years, as a self-taught artist, with a few lessons from her father, a painter. In 2021 the albums “Seis” and “1940 Carmen” came out, along with her version of “Nothing Else Matters” for the tribute album “The Metallica Blacklist”.

On 30 November 2022 she received Mexican citizenship. “Autopoiética” (2023), “Femme Fatale” (2025) and “Femme Fatale Vol. 2” (2026) followed.