Antropoceno‘s sophomore record dances in rhythm with the Earth, announcing the ancestral future.
Release date: March 20, 2026 | Longinus Recordings | Bandcamp | Instagram
2026 has been a year already full of transformative and immersive music. So far, however, few albums have been quite so soul-transporting as Antropoceno’s No Ritmo Da Terra. When I first pressed play on it, I was in my kitchen preparing a meal I wasn’t too excited for, and all of a sudden I felt my cramped, non-descript surroundings fall away from me. I forgot the monotonous routine I had put myself on, and dove into a world rich with color, fierce with possibility. Birds chirped and sang, and flute-like synths carried me off on their rapid dances of arpeggios, like even more birds. Beats from a drumkit and percussion instruments I had no name for cascaded in rhythms I had likewise seldom heard, but to dance along was easier than effortless. What was more, touches of post-rock and my beloved metal wove themselves into the sound, elevating the music’s power and my interest.
I knew immediately that No Ritmo Da Terra was worth reviewing, but upon further research I discovered that task would not be so straightforward. The review that follows will thus be long and complicated, so let me first tell you that this album is an absolute treat even if you don’t know what is going on. Feel free to get transported by it for 48 minutes, then come back and read the rest. So. Lua Viana, the São Paulo creator of Antropoceno, has devised the album with genre, cultural expression, and philosophy equally in mind. She grounded it in folk and contemporary styles of her native Brazil, some with West African roots, making the elements of Western musical genres subordinate. This places the album primarily in the heritage of Música Popular Brasileiro (MPB), which I am unfamiliar with. She also wrote the lyrics in Brazilian Portuguese, Tupi, and Yoruba, a combination that valorizes the indigenous and formerly enslaved populations of her country. I cannot read these lyrics, nor understand the cultural references in them, so I can only educate myself to the point of an informed outsider. Then there is a third caveat, one that complicates this album but also permits me to understand its motivations better, and that is its philosophy.
At the bottom of the Bandcamp page for No Ritmo Da Terra, Viana links an entire manifesto that she wrote to explain this album’s ethos. It is the second in a trilogy of albums dedicated to ‘the ancestral future‘, an idea, and ideal, from Brazilian indigenous philosopher Ailton Krenak. This future begins in the here and now, with the premise that the capitalist mechanisms of colonial powers threaten to destroy the environment and all sustainable ways of life. Liberal ideals of progress and equality are impotent to reform the inherent violence of the system, and so we must replace these ideals with new ones. Krenak says that we must adopt indigenous beliefs which decentralize humanity and emphasize its place in harmonious ecosystems. Hence the ancestral future, where modern innovations serve timeless wisdom.
No Ritmo Da Terra, then, is the musical implementation of the ancestral future. With its album art of a jaguar slaying a businessman (a modernized version of this painting), it declares itself a triumph over the profiteers pillaging Brazilian culture. Viana makes MPB songs that embrace the genre’s roots in Afro-Brazilian religion, and she gives them an intentionally ‘futuristic’ sound with boundary-pushing rock, metal, and electronic elements. Thus the ancestral future takes shape. This is a reversal of the overwhelming commercialization of MPB, where modern production has alienated the genre from its origins in marginalized spirituality (a familiar tale here in the USA). Viana is not the only musician creating futuristic music to reclaim Latin American indigenous culture. The artists behind Los Thuthanaka are acclaimed for their mix of electronics with indigenous Andean music, and Vauruvã have deeply woven MPB into atmospheric black metal. Tzompantli’s death metal with memories of the Aztecs is a favorite of mine. Viana’s work in Antropoceno contributes to this apparent movement, and she stands out for her brazen songwriting and the clarity of her political intentions.
I suppose I should talk a little about the music, this being an album review. No Ritmo Da Terra is dense. I’ve mentioned the plethora of musical styles that Viana has poured into it, and the craziest part is they all happen at once. There are moments on the album where drumkits and folk percussion weave several grooves together, shoegazey guitars play hazy melodies, glitchy synth flutters about, and birdcalls ring all at once. Meanwhile, Viana exalts a Yoruba or Candomblé deity with shrieks characteristic of black metal. She can manage these thick layers of sound for minutes on end, drowning us in the overwhelming dance. Ailton Krenak once said, ‘What our children learn from an early age is to put their hearts in rhythm with the earth.’ Many of us may have forgotten this ability, but the ancestral futuristic sound of Antropoceno pursues the power to teach it again.
No Ritmo Da Terra flows from track to track so smoothly you might not realize it’s happening. The great rivers of rhythm and melody that Viana crafts do not arrive at bombastic conclusions, but vanish into the sounds of the jungle, and it’s not long before the next one arrives. The album feels like entering into a huge collective dream, perhaps that of the world itself. It begins vivid and lucid, with shorter songs full of hooky melodies from Viana and guest vocalists with West African roots. These songs are a rush, and I find myself butchering languages I don’t know just to sing along with them. As the album continues, the lengths of the songs swell and shrink like a heartbeat in rhythm with the earth. The songs become looser, the vocals blending more and more into the instruments. By the end, we hear Viana reading passages from Krenak’s literature, even a recording of her grandmother describing their family’s history, voices rising up out of the ancestral haze. These songs might not be as jam-packed with recognizable melodies, but they are unstoppably immersive. Viana’s songwriting ambitions are just as strong as her political ones.
No Ritmo Da Terra is an extremely deep album, one that reveals more and more detail upon each listen. Viana doesn’t just mix samba, post-rock, glitch, field recordings, and Candomblé chants all at once and make it work. She does so to prove that it’s possible for modern innovation to serve indigenous peoples instead of oppress them, that it’s possible for the future to be harmonious with the environment, and the past. The future is now folks. It’s time the wider world caught on to the groundbreaking music coming out of the South American underground, and Antropoceno is as fine a reason as we could ask for.
