Boogarins show night in Porto Alegre. The tour centers on "Bacuri", their latest album, which I actually stopped listening to after buying my ticket — a trick I picked up from my dad Mr. Luiz: “The thing is not to overplay the songs you love, so you don’t get tired of them.”
It felt like one of those rare nights of Brasil with an S — the kind that celebrates its own culture. That vibe hit even harder considering we were in a city where local authorities had shut down our organic celebrations on Carnival, only to funnel public funds into a Saint Patrick’s Day cringe-fest a week later. Make of that what you will.
Everything was unfolding smoothly… until I had a strange little moment that stuck with me all night.
My Uber dropped me off on Joaquim Nabuco Street, right by the venue, Opinião. As I stepped out, the driver leaned over and asked:
“Cool, what’s going on tonight? Big crowd?”
And I froze for a second. What does a big crowd look like? In my fantasy, Boogarins would be selling out Beira-Rio Stadium — full production, lasers imported from Slovakia, 30-foot-high screens, the full sensory overload experience.
Instead, I just shrugged and kind of yelled back. “Not sure it’ll be that packed… It’s more like an alternative kind of band, you know?”
Then I realized I’d stepped out right by the artists’ entrance — basically in front of their van. Was I being a fan or what?
Later on, a friend goes, “Chill, man. Even if they heard you, they probably just laughed it off.”
*
The venue was decently full, but that comment stuck with me. As I waited in the crowd for the boogarinic beings to take the stage, these were the kinds of thoughts running through my head:
~“Look at all this movement pushing back against the 6-day workweek and all the other nonsense. Look how one’s whole life gets swallowed by work. If it were up to the suits, even our leisure time would have to turn a profit.”
~“And it starts with those who consume music — but let’s be real for a second: who nowadays really sits down and feels an album?”
Alright, maybe that’s just me sounding like an old man, right? Fair enough. So, nothing like psychedelia to stretch out time and make space for ideas.
The moment the band came on stage and people gathered in the dark, it all hit me at once. Rick Beato popped into my head — that cool guy on YouTube who’s always posting insightful interviews while also debating about how music as we know is dead.
*
One time Rick went through a list of the 25 most streamed artists on Spotify just to prove how few actual bands can survive the meat grinder.
At the time of the video, there were only three bands formed in the past ten years. One was called Grupo Frontera and another was Richy Mitch & The Coal Miners, whose work I look up to and found really ok. The other one was that processed cheese cosplay known as Måneskin (sorry, my opinion — I just can’t help it).
Anyway, his point was: if the 2000s were the boy band era, by 2010 it wasn’t even worth being a band anymore.
Which, curiously, is when Boogarins was born.
*
Being a recent fan, I could use a bit of context too.
Bacuri is about celebrating fatherhood for some of the band members — and also the band’s own maturity and longevity, from the way the album was recorded and produced.
It seems that Boogarins has been playing with themes of cycles, beginnings and endings since their earliest work. At least that’s what first drew me in when I first listened to them right after the pandemic.
Their debut album, As Plantas que Curam (2013), quick drew attention after being posted on Bandcamp and picked up by a North American blog to which they sent their material.
Not long after that, they received a three-album offer they couldn’t refuse from the Other Music label.
Their second album, the flawless Manual (2015), earned a Grammy nomination, and after that they just titled their next release Lá Vem a Morte — “Here Comes Death.”
You’ve probably figured out where I’m going with this: here was a young band embracing every bright new possibility — yet always flirting, in their lyrics, with the idea of impermanence in the face of the music industry's so-called greatness.
Then came Sombroudúvida (a play on the Portuguese words for “shadow” and “doubt”) — an album full of great tracks that still hold up in their live set today — followed by live experimental sessions, and finally a double album called Manchaca, built from the results of those improvisations.
Their songwriting had clearly matured, gradually embracing experimentation. What hadn’t crossed my mind was just how much their live performances were evolving.
*
Back to the present, cut to Opinião show. What felt like three hours of reflection might’ve only lasted a couple minutes.
Suddenly, that train of thought — from Rick Beato’s ideas to my impressions of the band — got cut off. Something shifted in my thoughts and time already felt warped as they took the stage, in this order: Dinho, Ynaiã, Raphael, and Benke.
I was reminded of the last Boogarins show I’d seen — when they performed a good chunk of Manchaca and Sombroudúvida albums [you can feel here that setlist]. At that show, the stage setup was different: Dinho stood stage right and handled most of the vocals.
I also thought back to a gig at Agulha, just days before the great flood — the brutal May 2024 storm that swallowed up parts of Porto Alegre and destroyed that venue entirely.
I’m slightly nearsighted too, to be fair — and not sure also if that was part of their idea. But now, with no fixed mic placements and no real “center,” it felt like the band had multiplied.
*
No clue about that. The intro to the first song had already started playing and it just hit me.
I felt lucky to be up close to something so special, and deep down, trying not to sound insensitive, also grateful I’m not 1.5 meters tall. Short and nearsighted would be too much.
Regardless of that, I saw a guy nearly this height enjoying and seemingly fully connected with everything. For some random association, 'Deleuze' pops into my mind (I'm that weird).
A line of yellow spotlights cuts across my eyes, and I start drifting about how Boogarins know they belong to a movement of a “minor music”.
In the milliseconds between two drum hits, I suddenly drift into those wild ideas between philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, when they said Kafka wrote “minor literature” because he used a marginal language — and that’s what made him great: in his game, comparisons no longer applied.
The bandinha, their own term of endearment on social media (literally “little band” in Portuguese), was there, but in no way as a small band. Not as a lesser band, but as a minor one, in the deleuzian sense:
Dismantling hierarchies while making beauty out of fragmentation; embracing the importance of creating on the margins of dominant industry languages by singing experiments and displacements in Third World Portuguese – all while daring to be a living, breathing organism on stage.
By doing that, they shape a kind of music that feels slightly off-center and yet deeply collaborative, staying true to their own terms.
What struck me the most during that reflection was how many incredible bands I’m probably missing out on.
*
I think that says enough. Maybe that’s why some (mostly local) lazy music journalists can’t describe what Boogarins actually is. They always seem to fall back on comparing them to Tame Impala.
Tame Impala is great, those songs are brilliant and Kevin Parker is a genius, so being compared to his work could easily sound like an obvious compliment. But the thing is Tame Impala is a controlled vision — a studio mindtrip executed live with random precision. I'm not even getting into the difference in personal backgrounds.
I have nothing against the seriousness of rock; Slint's Spiderland is among the best things I've ever heard, and the near-coldness of live psychedelic classics like Pink Floyd fascinates me. However, there’s a kind of psychedelia that only emerges in the vivacity and open dialogue between musicians on stage.
Boogarins, like many great bands that create together, bring something to the stage that solo projects can’t — the energy of collective creation.
That gap becomes clear as the moment resolves; everything clicks just as Ynaiã sings the Bacurí lyrics about “reigning in the dust of the sun”.
Thinking about it right there, no analogy seemed more fitting than this one.
*
Bacurí is truly a coronation — the reign of a “minor” band doing what they’ve learned, beyond the realm of comparisons.
In Chuva dos Olhos, they sing about the marginal freedom of a subject who “didn’t want more / didn’t want ground, just wanted peace”;
In Chrystian & Ralf (Só Deus Sabe), Benke steps up to the mic to speak of all the labor involved — “To gust, to love / To sing without fear / My own artifice / Better than suffocating / And while trying to speak / Of the unreal / I end up feeling sick”;
In Corpo-Asa, they also share the other side of it — “the blooming, paying to see, sharing dreams”;
"Don't mind if it's late / It doesn't matter anymore / Just let it stray” I think it was while Amor de Indie was fading out that Raphael turns his gaze to some gap above the stage and whistling a different melody, distracting us from the fact the music was ending.
In Deixa (my favorite moment of the set), Benke dives headfirst into Gilmour-like progressions and tones, until the melody sweeps everything away to say that “the force of being bends all directions”;
By the time Raphael leads the badass Poeira, these guys were just reading my thoughts. “Kept quiet / Then changed my mind” summed up the whole trip, at least for me.
*
Boogarins point toward invention, expansion, and breath — in a world where packs of suit-wearing denialists stage drama via through artificial intelligence; on a planet where swarms of producers pirate singles left and right to power the stage acts of millionaire inflatable puppets.
By doing so, hopefully they make these forms of art more accessible to those who, nowadays, can't seem to stop and truly feel an entire album.
At heart, the so-called ‘little band’ knows exactly who they’re up to being: leaning into the everyday need for psychedelia, and more alive than ever — not despite, but because of the music they create.
A task reserved for true giants.
Angustifolia ~ Slow words.