Silvana Estrada spent 25 years “not knowing how to get angry”, she says. “That cost me so much energy and dignity.” Sadness, though, she had always understood: “I live with her very close to me.” Now 28, the Mexican singer-songwriter grew up outside Veracruz, a city on the Gulf of Mexico, “witnessing violence from so many angles”: rampant femicide, narcoculture, environmental attacks on the coffee plantations and rivers of her home. As a lonely teenager, she discovered Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald. They helped guide the darkness she felt and introduced her to vocal improvisation. Estrada, born to a family of luthiers, started making her own music, played on a four-string Venezuelan cuatro and inspired by Mexican son jarocho (folk music). The title of her acclaimed 2022 debut, Marchita, translates to “withered”; the record offered a spare, devastating, deeply poetic account of first love gone awry.
“I consider her one of the richest artists of our time,” says her peer and mentor, the Mexican songwriter Natalia Lafourcade. “Her voice is freedom, it is birds of paradise, it is Mexico and Latin America. It reflects a deep connection to love, nature and human relationships.”
Estrada still loves that album, she says today, sitting in a New York cafe. It earned her a Latin Grammy for best new artist and critical raves. But afterwards, she says, “I really wanted to do something with my humour. After Marchita, I was a little bit trapped in this character that is sad and dark, very eloquent, very solemn. That is also me, but I wanted to show myself in a way that’s even closer to how I really am.” Estrada talks with tender humour about that serious young girl, so animatedly that her sparkly rose-shaped earrings swing. Some of Marchita’s songs dated back to when she was 18, she says: “All this eloquence, darkness, I see it as so much naiveness because I thought that was the only way to talk about love and dreams.”
Her second album, she decided, would be poppier, lighter. But then unexpected losses forced her to get acquainted with an even darker side of her personality. Estrada’s new lyrics are stark with recrimination and brutal despondence: for ex-lovers who couldn’t reciprocate; for a friend who ditched her “because he couldn’t stand that my career was” – she shoots her hand upwards – “and his wasn’t. I got so depressed after that. I thought, ‘I cannot believe that I’ve been loving you as my brother all these years and you don’t want to see me because you feel small?’ That shocked me so much.”
She channelled her indignation into Good Luck, Good Night, a fabulously melodramatic, comic kiss-off for something as pathetic as “el ghosting”. Every line feels as though it should be accompanied by the wayward slosh of a glass of wine. “Sometimes our lives are like a telenovela – infinite drama and suffering,” she says, referencing the high-octane Latin American soap operas of her youth. “Which is true, to be alive is to suffer, but being ghosted, the fact that someone who is alive decides to be a ghost for you – it’s so miserable!” She still sounds offended. ‘It’s funny because I guess it shows how small we can be.”
During the process of writing, “I was like, wow, anger is really helpful,” she says. “Anger is this energy that really wants you to be responsible for your needs and your limits. It’s beautiful, strange, uncomfortable, almost like a grandmother telling you: ‘What are you doing? You don’t want this.’ We need anger, actually, to fight for our lives and the lives of others.”
But Vendrán Suaves Lluvias (Soft Rains Will Come) doesn’t sound angry; it’s one of the year’s most unabashedly beautiful albums. After futile attempts to make the record with four other producers, Silvana decided to do it herself. She realised: “‘You’re the only one that knows what you want.’ It was so irresponsible to let in other people, to ignore my own desire.” She augments her cuatro with swooping flourishes of strings, piano and woodwind, her commanding voice brimming with compassion. The bright, dewy Como un Pájaro (Like a Bird), nominated for best singer-songwriter song at next month’s Latin Grammys, is as fresh as a spring morning. She was surprised by the joyful melodies that came out of her. “As I get older, I understand the importance of pleasure and joy, even during hard times. This album is like a pendulum between beauty and terror.”
The insult of being ghosted paled next to the tragedy of losing her best friend and fellow musician, Jorge, who was brutally murdered alongside his brother and uncle in December 2022. “This is a little bit embarrassing, but I didn’t value friendship very much when I was growing up,” she says. “I was a little bit weird. I liked music that nobody was listening to. I was very isolated. Even the friends I had were super mean to me. I’m super sensible [sensitive].” Her first real friend, Jorge taught her what friendship was. “Someone that loves you, accepts you, who has the generosity of telling you: ‘Hey, you did this and I didn’t like it,’ or, ‘This is amazing, I love you.’ We were inseparable.”
When Estrada wanted to move to Mexico City, her parents were unsure until they heard that Jorge was going too: “They loved Jorge so much. He was like an older brother to me.” When she started touring, he came too. “I enjoyed so much feeling loved, not so like this super lonely child.”
With Jorge, says Estrada: “I could be a child again. My heart was so light. And now my heart is heavy. I’m getting used to it.” Grave and sharpened by sudden bursts of strings, Un Rayo de Luz (A Ray of Light) is her tribute to him. It was written during a residency at the house of the late singer Chavela Vargas, her hero, and interpolates her words: “¿Cómo será de hermosa la muerte que nadie ha vuelto de allá?” (How beautiful must death be when no one has returned from it?) “I really want to believe that,” she says.
The killers were caught. “They’re gonna die in jail,” says Estrada, “but justice is the minimum. The state, everybody, failed us. I can’t even believe in jail. I believe in reintegration.”
Estrada has always been vocal about justice: one of the earliest online hits for her is a 2018 video supporting Mexican abortion rights, three years before they were legalised. In 2022, she released the song Si Me Matan (If They Kill Me) after the student Mara Fernández was murdered by a ride-share driver. “I try to use the voice I have and the space that has been given to me as an example of empowerment, especially for little girls,” she says.
Lafourcade was that example for Estrada. She returns the compliment. “She is undoubtedly the voice of young generations, with a soul and heart of great sensitivity,” says Lafourcade. “I see her as an old soul and wisdom within a young body full of vitality and beauty in every sense.”
In 2023, Mexico’s then president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, played Estrada’s music as part of an effort to deter young people from corridos tumbados, the genre of regional Mexican trap popularised by Peso Pluma that has been accused of glorifying drug cartels and stoking violence. Estrada says she was “honoured”, but feels otherwise conflicted. Instead of cancelling this kind of music, she says, “we should talk about why people are admiring people who are killing us, killing our freedom, killing all the things we love.” She adds: “In Mexico, there are so many things we need to start talking about, and we need to involve everybody. Conversation is important to change your reality.”
Listening to herself helped Estrada become accountable to her own feelings. Writing the ultimatum Dime (Tell Me), she realised she didn’t want an ex to stay; she wanted to leave. “It was such a useful thing to realise you can always turn around and walk away,” she says. “For me, it was hard to understand that I could just say no.”
She links it to Greek mythology, specifically the Furies: goddesses of vengeance depicted with horrifying facial features. “My interpretation is that they were angry because of all the injustice on Olympus. Nobody wants to feel connected to the Furies because they’re ugly – it’s a really machista, misogynist conception of female fury. But I actually feel much more connected with their spirit than the rest of the goddesses: OK, I’m gonna have snakes instead of hair and one eye in my frente – I don’t care: I just want to be whatever makes me happy, or more alive, or better.”
• Vendrán Suaves Lluvias is released via Glassnote on 17 October
