In an era when we are continually holding our icons up to the light, measuring how their politics match their art, Lido Pimienta positions hers front and center. For Pimienta, the art, the artist, and the political are all entangled. Her work is of her life, and is fused and suffused with it.

Since she began making music in punk and metal bands, when she was still, as she insists, “a child,” her lyrics have been about confronting injustice in her native Colombia. After immigrating to Canada in 2006, she continued making her own music, which was connected to her Colombian roots both musically and lyrically. Meanwhile, Pimienta became immersed in the Toronto art scene, pursuing a degree in art criticism while raising her young son. Her second album, 2016’s La papessa, catapulted Pimienta to international renown and won that year’s Polaris Music Prize, Canada’s top music honor. While accepting the award, Pimienta spoke of her recent experiences with racism in Canada and reminded her audience that they were standing on colonized First Nations land. She also expressed her frustration with a sound person, who condescended to her before the performance—a historical issue for her and many female performers. Billboard characterized this powerful moment as “an unexpected, obscenity-spiked outburst.” Since then, it’s evident that the music industry wants credit for putting an outspoken, indigenous queer woman onstage, but it doesn’t have much interest in what she’s saying—or, crucially, in addressing the racism and colonization she is asking all of us, as her audience, to account for.

Witnessing Lido Pimienta take the stage is remarkable. When I saw her perform in Chicago in January 2018, she was a few months pregnant, but her energy, joy, and humor were unyielding. Pimienta courts the audience with jokes and invitations, constantly asking them to engage, to connect, to bridge the chasm between audience and artist, to move beyond their role as consumers, to see themselves in her. Between her danceable incantations, she riffed on border crossing, lovingly mocked her own bandmates’ privileged upbringings, addressed the audience in Spanish, and invited marginalized folks in the room to come to the lip of the stage—she prioritized connection. During those forty minutes, the person she was onstage was a personification of the songs and work she has released in the last half decade.

A few weeks after that Chicago show, I spoke to Pimienta by phone, while she was still on tour, maximizing her time on the road before giving birth. She reflected on the ways motherhood has shaped her disciplined approach to her work; her forthcoming album, Miss Colombia; and the...