It’s a timely moment in Brazil for an artist rooted in Amazonian culture to release work that speaks to her origins and builds her personal brand around them. Gaby Amarantos, however, has long carried this banner.
Ever since she left the Tecnomelody band Tecnoshow to pursue a solo career aimed at national projection, her music has remained unapologetically grounded in brega and the other regional genres performed in her homeland, the State of Pará, in Brazil’s Northern Amazonian region. Even when it would have been easier to tailor her sound for larger audiences, Amarantos made few concessions to mainstream trends.
By finding a common denominator between local tradition and broader appeal, she achieved the remarkable feat of turning a brega song into a telenovela theme: “Ex Mai Love” (2012) became the biggest hit of her career. Over time, Gaby Amarantos increasingly turned up the volume of the creative and experimental side of Amazonian music, reaching a peak with 2021’s Purakê, where she presented a futuristic Afropop vision infused with indigenous Amazonian MPB elements.
Now, with Rock Doido (2025), all the groundwork Amarantos has laid over the years comes to fruition.
Contents
Rock Doido’s Evolution from Party Ritual to a Music Genre
The album is an introduction to rock doido, a distinct variant of the vibrant electronic music born in the North of Brazil. The expression means “crazy rock”; it’s meant to allude to the wildness of rock ’n’ roll, while it encompasses a wider kaleidoscope of musical influences. What began as a highlight moment of aparelhagem parties (the exuberant, sound system-driven gatherings that happen in the peripheries of Pará) has evolved into a fully recognized music genre.
Rock Doido functions almost as a formal legitimization of that evolution. In the aparelhagem parties, rock doido is the climactic moment when DJs spin tracks that echo tecnobrega and tecnomelody, but with a sharper repique and more “spoken” vocals (closer to variants like brega funk than the melodic, passionate brega traditional to Pará). The audience responds with the signature “treme” (shoulder-shaking) moves, a serendipitous nod to one of Amarantos’ longstanding jargons, which she incorporated into her 2012 solo debut album, Treme.
In recent years, DJs such as Miss Tacacá and Baby Plus Size (who produced Rock Doido’s second track, “Arrume-se Comigo”) have helped cement rock doido as a fully recognized genre that deserves attention alongside Brazil’s other popular electronic substyles, such as Brazilian funk. Until now, there wasn’t any “official starter pack” or fully-crafted albums one could rely on to get introduced to the genre.
Rock Doido’s audacity begins exactly with its title. By giving the album the same name as the musical genre, Amarantos stakes a claim: this is not just her album, this is the reference point for the genre. It reads like a compulsory masterclass, and at the same time, a starter class for anyone who wants to understand what rock doido is.
It’s as if she is saying, ‘If you want to speak about this music, you start here.’ It’s a framing move that elevates the record from a collection of songs to a cultural landmark. If Anitta’s Funk Generation was designed to present Brazilian funk to the world, then Gaby Amarantos’ Rock Doido is an introduction of Pará’s popular electronic music to Brazil itself.
Rock Doido‘s 22-tracks play less like a playlist and more like a DJ set at a aparelhagem party. Genres like tecnobrega (“Cerveja voadora”) and tecnomelody (“Carregador de aparelhagem”) feel almost slow compared to the purely rock doido-based tracks, but they merge effortlessly and add melodic grace to the mix. One track flows into the next, and they’re full of samples, shoutouts, playful clichés of the genre, and sound vignettes that locals and fans will recognize from the genre’s famous remixes and viral memes.
The funny and meme-ist recording “Eu tô no rock, mas é tu que eu amo” (“I’m at rock [doido party], but it’s you who I love”) is sampled in Amarantos’ collab with tecnomelody queen Viviane Batidão, “Te amo fudido”, and informs its lyrics about a woman divided by her love for aparelhagem parties and her love for a man who’s not worth her time. The DJ shibboleth “Explode o bagulho”, which often precedes the moment where rock doido tracks reach their peak appeal, appears in “Short Beira Cu”. Local catchphrases “Endoida” (chanted in “Interlúdio Égua Mana”) and “Dá-lhe sal” (sung in “Mamãe mandou”, and also baptizes the album’s best track) fill the album as if it’s meant to operate like a glossary of Pará’s aparelhagens culture.
Those clichés matter. For those familiar with the aparelhagem circuit, some references may seem obvious, even overfamiliar, such as mentioning samba or Carnival to define “Brazil” to a foreigner. Yet placing these in Rock Doido is both a way to present them to outsiders at large and to give them a permanent place within a carefully crafted oeuvre. What once existed scattered across unofficial remixes, live sets, TikTok audios, or ephemeral party moments now occupies a formalized space, ready to be cited, remembered, and passed down as canonical markers of rock doido for future generations.
Rock Doido Converses with Latin-Amazonian Culture
In less explicit layers of Rock Doido’s homages and allusions, there are resonances with other urban-born, electronic-driven genres in Latin America, as well as conversations with standards of global pop music. The Spanish lyrics of “Tumbalatum” and its beats highlight just how close rock doido sits to reggaeton, for example.
“Bonito feio”’s choice of rhythm for the chorus is bachata. This is no coincidence. Pará has always been one of Brazil’s most openly Latino-identified regions, absorbing and exchanging culture with its Spanish-speaking neighbors. Even Gaby Amarantos’ curation of references and covers resonates.
Releasing their own versions of pop hits sung in English has long been a marker of brega, tecnobrega, and tecnomelody musicians; Amarantos herself has released many. Rock Doido would not work as an aparelhagem magnum opus without one of these versions.
Gaby Amarantos’ choice was Gotye’s “Somebody that I used to know”, a 2011 indie rock hit built off a (initially unauthorized) sample of Brazilian musician Luiz Bonfá. American rapper Doechii sampled the same track in 2024’s “Anxiety”, which became a global success and was also well-received in Brazil. With “Foguinho”, Amarantos flips the narrative. While reinforcing the culture of covers and musical interpretations of foreign music that is typical of sound systems, Amarantos draws attention to a Brazilian sample that received the same treatment from foreigners. It’s not just homage; it’s cultural repossession.
Speaking of cultural heritage, Rock Doido also mixes traditional, organic Amazonian rhythms such as carimbó in “BBBBBBB” and “Rock doido é meu lugar”. The album might be a shout-out to the futuristic, grandiose aims of Pará’s popular electronic music, but the grassroots indigenous and African influences of the region’s music were not left out. It must have been a challenge to do so in a way that does not sound self-stereotyped or overly reverential.
Gaby Amarantos Creates a Landmark with Rock Doido
For decades, the sounds of Northern Brazil have remained underrecognized, even within Brazil, despite their immense cultural significance. In recent years, as these rhythms have gained a small measure of visibility, some artists have rushed to express regional pride in ways that appear overly literal, almost propagandistic, and often less engaging for outside listeners. Even Gaby Amarantos herself has occasionally flirted with this approach in works such as “Mulher da Amazônia” (“Woman of the Amazon”).
Rock Doido could easily have been the type of manifesto album that would end up becoming yet another literal and uninviting advertisement of Pará culture. Amarantos, however, skillfully escaped the trap: she left the culture and the music to shine for itself.
Far beyond simply proclaiming her love for her region and its culture, Gaby Amarantos’ true reverence lies in the artistic ambition with which she presents it all, investing in a bold aesthetic that even results in the above album-themed film and a deliberately “overstuffed” album cover, a nod to Michael Jackson’s Dangerous, yet also a meta-commentary on the eclectic, layered fusion of sounds that defines aparelhagem culture.
In that way, attaching her name to a genre’s name is not opportunism. It’s a culmination of the years Gaby Amarantos spent advocating for and expanding her region’s music.