“Ugh, get off the stage,” I moaned, rolling my eyes at the Chilean band playing an objectively fine synthpop set. Sure, the music spoke to my disco-gay proclivities, but I was there to see Cut Copy, and the only thing standing between me and my Australian dance heroes was a scraggly hipster duo called Dënver. It was May 2011 at some dingy club in Santiago, years before my relationship to music turned professional. I’d seen Dënver a few months earlier at the first edition of Lollapalooza Chile, where I also became exasperated waiting for Cat Power to come out next, despite knowing the American singer-songwriter only for “Sea of Love,” which was featured on the Juno soundtrack. These twee white people with flannel shirts and mustache finger tattoos defined an era for all of us indie-inclined, so I drank and thrashed accordingly.
By the end of 2011, I was back in New York City. Three years of glorious South American adventure—one spent in Argentina and two in Chile—had finally come to an end. I’d been laid off from managing a Santiago apartment hotel, and my boyfriend, exhausted with his mind-numbing office job, was eager to return to the US to attend grad school. We nervously drifted back north, where the economy was still in a tenuous recovery following the global financial crisis of 2008. Behind every cinematic wanderlust fantasy, a practical catalyst.
Upon our return, my boyfriend took refuge with his family and I crashed with my friend Nelia, in the Bronx, sharing her bedroom with our other bestie, Evelina, and sometimes a cavalcade of nieces and nephews. Every day, I sat in the dining room in my pajamas sending bogus résumés, apologetically thanking Nelia’s mother for taking me in, promising retroactive rent as soon as I received my first paycheck. When not refreshing the 9GAG home page or keeping up with the latest fallout from Occupy Wall Street, Nelia and I got into celebrity gossip and music. One night, while reminiscing about Chile and how I missed going out for champagne with friends, I decided to excavate my suitcase for any memento that might spice up the chat. In one of the pockets I found a CD; the sleeve was made from recycled paper and had a colorfully traced gymnast on the cover. It was Dënver’s second album, Música, gramática, gimnasia, a parting gift from a friend who designed their website. I popped the CD into my computer, realizing I’d never paid attention to the band, and found this was exactly like the music I enjoyed from Cut Copy and Cat Power, but in Spanish.
I was baffled at first. I recognized retro synths and romantic vocal harmonies similar to those that made me a fan of Brooklyn-flavored darlings like Hot Chip and the New Pornographers. I googled related artists and found more Chilean names: Álex Anwandter, Astro, Gepe, Fakuta, and Adrianigual, all of whom set melancholy confessionals to some sort of disco or psychedelic beat. I recognized two others, Francisca Valenzuela and Javiera Mena—soaring raconteurs who opened their respective days at Lollapalooza nearly a year prior, me catching only the end of their shows as I waited for the international acts that followed. As the night progressed, I uncovered a scene the Spanish newspaper El País called a “new pop paradise”—simultaneously thrilled by this treasure trove of music and devastated I hadn’t experienced it in real time.
My discovery was especially galling because it’s not like I wasn’t aware of the Chilean phenomenon; I just didn’t care. Growing up a lonely weirdo in the Dominican Republic, I internalized that no such music—or anything cool, for that matter—could exist “here” (that is, below the USA). That was an idiotic take, but before the internet and social media facilitated ultra-niche tribes, and in Latin America’s economically precarious and often conservative artistic landscape, tapping into subcultures required diligent digging. Not everyone is willing to foster a local scene, an attitude that fuels aspiration for fashionable narratives arriving from North America and Europe, leading to disregard for homegrown talent. However, if you want flowers in the garden, you have to make an effort to water them, and now I earn a living preaching about the amazing music flourishing across the region to audiences who rarely give a fuck. It’s funny how karma always collects.
Chile has remained a pivotal force behind my life and career, since living in the country taught me the historical and cultural nuances that coalesced into an artistic juggernaut. A significant variable was the coming of age of a generation born at the end of Augusto Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship. In 1973, following the United States–assisted coup against his predecessor, Salvador Allende, the regime tortured and disappeared thousands of civilians, driving legions more into exile. The high-profile murder of folk icon Victor Jara—a crucial voice of proletariat solidarity—was instrumentalized as a cautionary tale against dissent. Rapper Ana Tijoux would rise to fame nearly four decades later with her searing LP, 1977, exorcising much of the trauma and institutional impunity that haunted her family’s banishment to France.
A blueprint of politically charged storytelling emerged in the early 1980s with Los Prisioneros, who took aim at capitalist greed (“Quieren dinero”), Euro-gringo xenophobia (“We Are Sudamerican Rockers”), and socioeconomic disparity (“El baile de los que sobran,” “Tren al Sur”). Their massive pop crossover, Corazones, was released in 1990, pairing new wave synths and drum machines with stadium-size anthems of heartbreak and desire. The trio disbanded soon after, coinciding with Pinochet’s exit from power, but their legacy of danceable social discourse lived on with the children of democracy.
In the new millennium, electronic music became antithetical to the hypermasculine rigidity of the rock en español age, producing campy pop groups Miranda! in Argentina and Lulu Jam! in Chile. These neon trailblazers paved the way for my undisputed favorites: Javiera Mena and Álex Anwandter, gifted songwriters and producers who struck a sublime balance of intimate confessions and thumping earworms. They were also gay as hell and made little effort to hide it, which for the first time gave me idols my same age.
Mena was open about her sexuality from the beginning, debuting in 2006 with the singer-songwriter classic Esquemas juveniles and evolving into a full-blown disco diva with her self-titled follow-up. Her songs captured the clammy-handed giddiness of budding lesbian romances, and cheeky covers of Los Prisioneros’ “Amiga mía” and Daniela Romo’s “Yo no te pido la luna” tributed classics embraced and re-signified on LGBT dance floors. Anwandter, on the other hand, was a combative genius who let the work speak for him. Enviably tasteful references to nightlife iconography like Paris Is Burning, Cruising, and Grace Jones made his calls to burn the church and state sound chic. I discovered him during the transitional period between his rock band Teleradio Donoso and his experimental solo debut, Odisea, where he stepped into paranoid ravings about Santiago’s chaotic urban sprawl (“Batalla de Santiago”) and ketamine-fueled magical realism (“Casa Latina”).
I played these artists on a constant loop during my first years back in New York, when I refashioned myself as an androgynous club kid and cultivated friendships with many future stars of RuPaul’s Drag Race. I craved more of this younger, hipper Latin American music that diverged from the alienating tropical tunes of my upbringing, and in the summer of 2012, the Latin Alternative Music Conference invited Chile’s rising pop tarts to take over the city. Their careers were still in infancy, so the shows were tiny and the access huge. I remember Mena seducing a girl from the stage, pointedly dedicating the lusty chorus of “Luz de piedra de luna,” while I later kindled a friendship with Anwandter after he saw me pull a date into the bathroom. He messaged me over Facebook the next morning, inviting me to a party because I seemed fun.
By 2015, I was writing for Remezcla, and I returned to the Andean nation to visit friends and hit up Lollapalooza, which I covered for the now defunct MTV Iggy. Buzzy new names had emerged: Marineros arguably closed the scene’s pop chapter with the longing pedal distortion of “Secretos” and “Cae la noche,” setting the stage for an indie rock revival spearheaded by edgier bands Niños del Cerro and Playa Gótica. I could sense a changing of the guard, and the following year, reggaeton star Tomasa del Real and her party turned full-fledged genre, neoperreo, pulled focus toward a raunchy digital underground that spread like twerking wildfire. I no longer felt at home, musically or nostalgically, and as with all formative obsessions, I fell off the Chile bandwagon.
In 2018, I left New York. I sold my furniture, stored vinyl and sequined garments with my sister, and backpacked across the Southwestern US, Central America, and Mexico. The plan was to eventually meet my boyfriend back in Santiago, but in the meantime I settled in Mexico City, expanding my portfolio with stories on Bandcamp Daily and Boiler Room and ramping up my podcast, Songmess.
A year later, as we mapped our next moves, massive waves of civil unrest broke out across Chile. The news called it El Estallido Social, as millions of people poured into the streets demanding a new constitution that reined in staggering income inequality, recognized the Indigenous Mapuche nation, and codified gender and sexual inclusion at an institutional level. The government responded with violent repression, creating a protracted conflict that was never actually resolved. Then came whispers of a mysterious virus wreaking havoc in China, and soon our southbound plans—like the rest of the world’s—were put on ice.
If I was detached from the Chilean scene before, the combined blow of El Estallido Social and the pandemic only widened the chasm. A titanic mainstream formed around reggaeton and trap superstars Polimá Westcoast and Pablo Chill-E, broadcasting gritty tales from the peripheral communities at the center of the country’s socioeconomic restructuring. The underground pivoted toward hardcore, emo, and grunge, producing visceral records that captured the rage of a generation watching their country collapse while in confinement. I related to these movements as a journalist but not as a fan—I’ve never thrived in a streetwise context, nor am I especially angsty—and I realized indie pop escapism was now a privilege afforded to very few.
During an ambitious 2022 South American tour, I spent a few bummer weeks in Santiago. The prosperous, rapidly developing city I’d called home a decade prior was in tatters. A once pristine downtown wore burned buildings like battle scars, the streets now tense with expectation of a blitz. All efforts to pass a new constitution were defeated through tedious referendums and the overwhelmingly negative response to an agenda that prioritized social justice rather than material concerns around health, education, and the economy. A friend in Argentina described it as “legislating like college students,” and El Estallido Social’s abject failure resulted in polarized resentment and collective sadness. As I conducted interviews for Songmess, I clung to my throwback indie favorites, neglecting new music and, by proxy, my job.
But my colleagues kept going to Chile, and good friends still recommended music. In early 2024, the Venezuelan YouTube critic Doble R put me on to a scrappy reggaeton artist called Sinaka, whose summer opus, Kema, unfolded like a study in classic ’90s perreo mixtapes, swimming against the algorithmic trendseeking of his counterparts. He also told me to check out Javiera Electra and Phuyu y La Fantasma, artists twisting cherished folk traditions of cueca and décimas into spacey prog and blistering hardcore. I was again intrigued, and as I planned another trip south with stops in Argentina and Uruguay, I decided to add a few Chilean music industry markets to my calendar.
First was Fluvial, which took me to Valdivia in the country’s Región de los Ríos, where small showcases were integrated into a city of modern Bavarian architecture peppered with breweries, colorful docks, and universities specializing in environmental sciences. There I saw Javiera Electra, a trans singer-songwriter who cut her teeth busking on buses and soup kitchens, alchemizing her trials of self-realization and survival into operatic folk. Her a capella rendition of Simón Díaz’s “Tonada de luna llena,” delivered while pointing a sword toward the heavens, is seared into my memory.
The next week I explored Pulsar, in Santiago, a more established industry fête held at the emblematic Estación Mapocho—a former train terminal turned cultural center. I dug through the promotional stands of labels Casata, Registro Móvil, and Sello Fisura—hubs for an essential new generation of art punks including Déjenme Dormir, Asia Menor, Candelabro, and Dolorio & Los Tunantes. I gravitated toward Estoy Bien, a Midwest emo trio whose cathartic wails about loneliness and social awkwardness contrast sharply with the hilarious banter between its members. I snuck out of Pulsar for a packed sideshow where they warmed up the crowd with a Beastie Boys playlist and cat-meme visuals, followed by throbbing mosh-pit therapy.
In no uncertain terms, this latest trip restored my faith in Chile, and once again sparked reflection and self-critique. I’ve made a career of championing the new and the next, and because of emotional attachment to a defining moment in my life, I’d rejected the country’s social and artistic evolution—an affront to the struggle and loss of the past five years. The world’s apocalyptic present isn’t as comforting as a romanticized past, but I can’t turn back the clock and refuse to live in delirium.
During a recent interview with Rodrigo Romero Fuentes, the man behind Phuyu y la Fantasma, we discussed how Chilean folk has crept back into underground scenes, acknowledging Electra’s theatrics, the visionary trap-cuecas of rapper Martín Acertijo, and Romero’s own jagged forays into post-rock and hardcore. He told me it was crucial to study Chile’s history in order to dream of what it may still become, and that too often national heritage and identity are forgone in favor of foreign influence. “We’re part of a tradition, and I’d like to vindicate what is being forgotten,” he said, underscoring the foundational value of the past as well as an undying impetus of forward movement.
Richard Villegas is a music journalist, podcaster, and professional chismoso with bylines in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, Bandcamp, and Remezcla. When not raging behind his desk in the Dominican Republic, you can find him traipsing through Latin America in search of fresh underground music and a cheap local beer.
Illustration: Jonas Kalmbach
