ANTROPOCENO - No ritmo da terra

Launched in 2025 with a work titled “Naturaleza Morta”, Anthropocene is the new project of Brazilian transgender musician Lua Viana, already active on the São Paulo scene under the moniker Sonhos Tomam Conta. While “Naturaleza Morta” still showed affinities with the shoegaze softness of her previous project, “No ritmo da terra” marks a radical transformation, both conceptually and musically. And it's one of the most extreme, original and impactful things you'll hear this year.

In the cover art, drawn by Poty Galaco taking inspiration from the style and themes of Colombian painter Noe Leon, we see a businessman in shirt and tie being mauled by a jaguar. It's a violent image, in keeping with the idea underpinning Lua Viana's new project: a music that unites ancestral past and future — one of the album's tracks is programmatically titled “Futuro Ancestral”. The idea, needless to say, entails a rupture, a rejection of the Anthropocene and, in Brazil's case, of colonialism. What emerges is a psychedelic, fourth-world samba-metal that sets out to reconcile humankind with nature. The album's eight tracks are the stages of a reckless, psychedelic work, capable of conjuring images and stirring visceral reactions in the listener. It's a journey best recommended and enjoyed as a whole, making it pointless to single out individual moments or facets.

It often starts from Amazonian field recordings — mysterious hisses coming from the dense foliage, rustling and rushing sounds. It's into this primordial nature that Anthropocene grafts human interventions: sketches of piano and samba guitars, electronic glitches, vocalizations from Afro-Brazilian tradition (Yoruba and Tupi) that degenerate into metal screams, capoeira percussion and death and black metal double pedals. But above all, post-rock guitars that take off on psychedelic flights, slaloming between vegetation and snakes.

“No ritmo da terra” is an avant-garde record with a strong conceptual charge, for which Lua Viana drew inspiration from the thought of Brazilian indigenous intellectual Ailton Krenak. It's a work that thus aligns itself with the so-called “Nova vanguarda paulistana”, but also one of astonishing immediacy, one that can draw in even listeners not exactly accustomed to sounds as challenging as those shaken up in its mad, brilliant mixture.

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31/03/2026