If anyone still needed proof that Brazil is a country profoundly in love with its own music, 2025 has brought data that settles it for once and all. According to Luminate’s 2025 Midyear Music Report, Brazil is the Latin American nation that consumes the most local music. On Spotify Brazil, a staggering 75% of all streams go to domestic artists.
This may have something to do with Brazil’s isolated position as the only Portuguese-speaking country in Latin America, but it also comes from abundance. The mainstream remains dominated by Brazilian-crafted genres that feed an enormous musical economy: sertanejo, pagode, trap, Brazilian funk, and piseiro.
Pop may struggle to challenge the dominant forces in Brazilian music for the mainstream. However, the simple fact that a solid, self-referential pop industry still stands shows how vast the country is: in Brazil, even niche genres have the foundation to sustain themselves.
Brazilian pop in 2025 didn’t really see many blockbuster releases. Still, it thrived because artists felt free to recombine local textures with pop vocabulary in ways that paint a larger picture of how the country’s rewriting its relationship to identity. Brazil is rediscovering many of the Brazils that it harbors within itself, and that’s shaping new aesthetics that echo in its pop music as well. Get to know the ten Brazilian pop albums released in 2025 that best captured these aesthetics.
10. GOMES — Puro Transe
Pernambuco singer GOMES crafts a crystalline pop record that could be mistaken for a post-Jão emotional diary if it weren’t also folding in deeper Northeastern textures. The highlight of Puro Transe is the dramatic “Ai ai, meu Deus”, a luminous collaboration with As Ceguinhas de Campina Grande, a folk chant trio rooted in Pernambuco’s traditional coco. It’s a meeting of generations and aesthetics that signals one of the strongest pop trends of the present and future: Brazilian artists turning their ears toward the “Brasil profundo” [“deep (corners of) Brazil”] and turning traditions into pop.
9. Anderson Neiff — I*E*A*A*N
One of the year’s most chaotic and brilliant releases, I*E*A*A*N stands for “Infelizmente, eu amo Anderson Neiff” (“Unfortunately, I love Anderson Neiff”), a statement from a viral video that the brega funk singer turned into a vignette and the motto of a messy, loud, and irresistibly fun album.
Neiff assembles a Frankenstein of brega funk and hyperactive dance music, stitching together Benny Benassi samples, Harry Potter and Chaves dubs, and the erratic humor of internet culture. It’s not a polished album, and it’s clear that it doesn’t want to be one.
This is Brazilian Northeastern cyberpunk through digital collage and brega funk beats. You may not like it, but you have to agree with how Neiff defines himself in one of the album’s vignettes: he may not be the best, nor the worst, but he’s indeed different from the rest.
8. Rachel Reis — Divina Casca
I like to call Rachel Reis’ style “pop baiano” (pop made in Bahia). It’s not a restrictive label; instead, it’s a so-called genre that encapsulates the unique and diverse shades of Bahian music, and where Reis could reign. Divina Casca is pure pop baiano perfection: Reis mixes axé, pagodão, arrocha, and ijexá with a uniquely hers warm, chic softness. The long-loved single “Caju (Noda)” finally finds its home here, surrounded by silky tracks like “Jorge Ben” and dynamic collaborations with Bahia music visionaries BaianaSystem and Psirico, as well as rappers Don L and Rincon Sapiência.
7. Julia Mestre — MARAVILHOSAMENTE BEM
Standing on the fine line between indie pop and MPB, Julia Mestre’s MARAVILHOSAMENTE BEM sounds progressive yet cosmopolitan in its sensibility. “Pra Lua” floats like a siren chant sung over modern bolero beats, but tracks like “Sou Fera” echo Rita Lee and Marina Lima (an evident influence and collaborator on “Marinou, Limou”), city pop, and contemporary pop-rock sophistication. From vocals to arrangement to mastering, MARAVILHOSAMENTE BEM glides like silk on the ears.
6. Rachel Reis — No seu Radinho
Yes, it’s Rachel Reis again in our list. It’s not our fault she released two albums in one year, and both stand out from other pop endeavors. Reis earns every slot. While Divina Casca is grander in scope, No seu Radinho flows more organically like soda you can’t stop drinking on a hot day. Divina Casca is a full-course meal; No seu Radinho is a delicious, quick-to-eat snack. Songs like “Ensolarada” make Divina Casca an album that takes itself too seriously, while songs like “Menino Fatal” show that in No seu Radinho, Reis is more relaxed and having more fun. The chord progressions are catchier, the beats are danceable: this is the type of pop baiano to dance to on the beach.
5. Seu Jorge — Baile à la Baiana
Is Seu Jorge pop? Many people put him in the MPB or samba-rock box, and that’s not wrong. Still, he’s also one of Brazil’s most recognizable pop figures: an understated showman who navigates samba, MPB, soul, and African diasporic grooves with ease.
In Baile à la Baiana, that synthesis is refined. This is a contemporary Brazilian pop record precisely because it’s built from the raw materials that have always fueled the country’s mainstream: batuque, groove, percussion, guitar, musical raw materials originating from Africa and Latin America, which laid the foundations for Brazilian genres such as axé, lambada, carimbó, samba, and funk.
Interestingly, it’s only in the album’s closer, “Dia de mudança”, that we hear the type of samba-rock Seu Jorge became famous for. All the rest is a miscellaneous celebration of Brazilian joy that feels almost naive, like pre-Bolsonaro hope and positivity. Songs like “Shock” and “Lasqueira” recall old school guitar-driven axé music like Chiclete com Banana. “Sete Prazeres” and “Sábado à noite” insert Seu Jorge in the tradition of Brazilian 1970s funk and soul music.
What Baile à la Baiana also is: very obviously “Brazilian vibes”, very Black Joy archetypal-driven, and the type of music you’ll hear for the first time, thinking you’ve already heard before. All of that, though, is crafted with a sophistication that elevates its familiar gestures into something first-rate.
4. Urias — Carranca
Urias has always had an unmistakable presence in Brazilian queer pop culture, but Carranca marks a turning point for her as a musician. Her earlier work leaned into diva-pop appeal and club-friendly spoken delivery, not bad, but still far from what she shows she’s capable of with Carranca. In Carranca, Urias’ vocals are more expressive and best suited to styles like “Quando a fonte secar”. The compositions are more textured, like in “Águas de um mar azul” and “Se eu fosse você”.
The album’s thematic focus (Brazilian Blackness, danger, beauty, and resilience) also lands with clarity. It peaks in “Voz do Brasil”, where she samples Carlos Gomes’ “O Guarani”, an iconic opera etched into Brazil’s collective consciousness through its decades-long use as the theme of the state radio program “A Voz do Brasil”. Urias plays with the sample’s seriousness by rapping over it the words “boobs, ass, money, wh*re, party, drugs, Carnival”; almost a word cloud of things that are, too, commonly associated with Brazil, in a near-satire whose irreverence is amplified by rapper Major RD’s closing verse.
Urias has never hit so hard in artistry and critique, and this ambition looks good on her.
3. Barbarize — MANIFEXTA
This is one of the freshest projects of the year: Bárbara Vitória and YuriLumin form the duo Barbarize, a nod to Pernambuco’s manguebeat pioneer Chico Science, with a reimagined lens that includes funk, afropop, and even reggaeton.
The execution sounds refreshing on their debut album, MANIFEXTA, where Barbarize pose themselves as natural heirs of Nação Zumbi’s progressive maracatu. Except they infuse it with dance culture, Afrofuturist aesthetics, and a touch of sex appeal that makes everything sound fashion-minded, inventive, and contemporary. Their work recalls the collective energy of Brazilian crews like Dream Team do Passinho, or even a more dance-driven spin on Digable Planets.
In “Mangue Boogie”, their flow even echoes Digable Planets’ laid-back cadence, while tracks like “Pararatibum” revere the raw, intense vocal grit of maracatu. It’s all very organic, with a quiet elegance that signals, above all, that the duo isn’t trying to perform innovation; they simply inhabit it. Their kind of innovation is one we should keep an eye on.
2. Marina Sena — Coisas Naturais
When Marina Sena released her debut album De Primeira in 2021, we said she was “not just the moment, she was the future”. That future has arrived. Marina reached her artistic apex thus far. Like Aristotle’s theory of potentiality and actuality, Coisas Naturais is the blossoming of De Primeira’s Marina Sena, an already refined Sena that captivated Brazil with her quirky yet sexy yet seriously talented persona.
If Sena’s music has always sounded MPB on the verge of pop or vice-versa, Coisas Naturais perfects this formula. It’s a seamless blend of MPB’s voice & guitar songwriting style with catchy melodies and dancing beats drawn from bachata, piseiro, pop-rock, and Brazilian funk. This album makes Sena both a natural magnet for diva-pop forum diehards and a rare figure capable of modernizing Brazilian pop without losing its roots.
“Lua Cheia” carries the mystical essence Sena had always shown the potential to embody, while “Doçura” and “Numa Ilha” lean into the Latinidad she has continually inhabited with ease. “Mágico” is as magical as its title suggests. “Ouro de tolo” is top-notch MPB songwriting. “Anjo” is her 1970s progressive rock/MPB diva moment. All of that is delivered, as Sena herself sings in “Sem Lei”, in “a totally natural style”. Blessed be the forces acting through her.
1. Gaby Amarantos — Rock Doido
You know those movies that spend half their runtime showing the hero quietly assembling the perfect conditions for triumph, and the climax unfolds as if everything was leading perfectly to that moment? You know the feeling when something similar begins to unfold in real life, but you hesitate to believe it’ll work out the same way, because life isn’t a movie?
For the culture of Pará and for Amazonian electronic music, which for decades have been neglected for their cultural contribution to Brazil’s pop culture, Rock Doido feels that moment from the movie. Not that other Pará pop icons haven’t had moments of national acclaim. Still, Rock Doido brings the perfect amount of artistry to lend legitimacy to this narrative at just the right time. It feels like Gaby Amarantos’ hero’s call reaching its highlight; it’s the kind of record she could only venture into now, when the cultural winds align in her favor.
The year 2025 was a triumphant moment for the people of the Brazilian State of Pará: with music genres like tecnobrega rising in awareness, the United Nations’ COP30 happening in Belém, and Joelma finally earning a spot at the country’s major music festival (Rock in Rio), all eyes were on Pará and the Amazon region of Brazil. All the stars were aligning for a record like Rock Doido to take the spotlight in the Brazilian pop scene.
Gaby Amarantos seized that moment and delivered an album as conceptual and futurist as it is visceral and urgent. Rock Doido positions the sound of Pará sound system parties’ “rock doido” moment as a genre in its own right, one that derives from and dialogues with brega, tecnobrega, tecnomelody, and carimbó. It’s a perfect blend of Pará’s futuristic megalomania and proud heritage.
In times defined by anxiety and short-form attention spans, Amarantos has capitalized on the zeitgeist and delivered something of sufficient quality to avoid relying solely on hype. Rock Doido is the year’s most fully realized pop statement: a work that codifies Pará’s vanguard music and energy and compels Brazilian pop to acknowledge the Northern side of Brazil not merely as a legit contributor, but this time, as a center of gravity.