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At a moment when Brazil’s independent music scene is not only creatively but commercially strong, outsiders have more power than ever to shape what the mainstream might sound and look like next. In the country’s ever-mutating pop and hip-hop scenes, including events such as the MADA Festival, even in music genres that wouldn’t normally be described as psychedelic, some artists’ music seems to vibrate with a touch of delirium.
If back in the conservative 1970s, bands like Secos & Molhados introduced psychedelia to the mainstream through body paint, flamboyant hip-shaking performances, and subtle nods to queer expression (provocations that may seem basic today, yet at the time, were revolutionary), now, punk and psychedelia must go further into the taboo.
This is happening, and it’s emerging from the underground. Across rap, reggae, cumbia, baile funk, and dance music, independent artists collage sounds and symbols with humor, irony, and social critique.
The MADA Festival Deliriously Alive
In one of the country’s Northeastern cities, Natal, the MADA Festival – now in its 27th year and recognized by law as an intangible heritage in the State of Rio Grande do Norte – has long served as an incubator for these new tendencies. In recent years, the festival has taken place at Arena das Dunas, the beautiful soccer stadium built for the 2014 FIFA World Cup. The stadium’s name refers to Natal’s famous sand dunes and sets the tone for an environment that seems to naturally host the delirious aesthetic seen in many of the festival’s lineup names.
In 2025, the MADA festival once again became a force for Brazil’s next generation of pop and hip-hop thinkers. Leading acts like BaianaSystem, Marina Sena, and Don L showed how Brazil can update and tailor sounds like rock, dance-pop, and rap to local accents.
On another hand, it’s in the B-side of the festival lineup that the germ of upcoming innovation lies. In the festival’s smaller stages and/or less hyped timelines of the main stages, independent artists like Potyguara Bardo, O Cheiro do Queijo, Katy da Voz e As Abusadas, and Edgar blurred the lines between concert and performance art, channeling a kind of serious madness. Circus, mythology, and visual madness merged into a fever dream of sound and color.
Few things are more Brazilian-coded than playing with irreverence and seriousness, and that’s exactly what these four acts deliver. PopMatters attended MADA Festival and talked with some of them.
Potyguara Bardo‘s Techno-Humanist / Naturalistic Pop Vision
Drag queen Potyguara Bardo, the festival’s most beloved local act and one of Rio Grande do Norte’s best-known exports, performs like a mystic pop diva. Her resonant contralto voice is adorned by her purple hair and dramatic body performance. Part of her frequent visual presentation even includes elf ears, although at MADA, her ears were covered by an elegant hood. Bardo’s universe blends the naturalistic (think: forest spirits and enchanted creatures) with a technological twist in electronic forró beats.
Recently, Bardo has drawn attention for her outspoken embrace of Artificial Intelligence as a creative tool. Trained in Information Technology, she sees AI not as a threat but as an extension of her craft; she even designed the cover of her 2025 EP, Romântica, using this tool. For her, digital and magical worlds do not clash, but merge beautifully
O Cheiro do Queijo’s Buffoonish Rap-Rock
O Cheiro do Queijo is a troupe of clown-rappers who fuse circus acts, Brazilian Northeastern guitar riffs, rap, cumbia, family-friendly absurdism, and swearworded sharp critiques of Brazil’s neoliberal bureaucracy. It’s too much nonsense of a combination to make sense unless it was deeply organic, and on stage, that’s exactly how their performance feels.
At each curse word, each joke, each lyric in which they describe themselves as puppets of a cynical sociopolitical system, their performance feels like a ritualistic outpouring of collective imagination. Not a psychedelic trip but the memory of one.
Perhaps one of the biggest gainers of MADA’s 2025 edition (they entered as underdogs, left as the cherry on top of BaianaSystem’s headline concert), O Cheiro do Queijo knew how to make the most of their limited time to engage their small yet fully immersed audience. Even first-timers couldn’t help but dance, jump, and join the mosh pit that the clowns encouraged at the end.
In an interview with PopMatters, the members insist that nothing they do, either with humor or music, is new. Watching them live, you can’t deny that what they do is fabulously subversive.
Katy da Voz e as Abusadas’ Punk-Funk
Festival attendees who went home early, or who barely neared the distant stage Baile da MADA, missed one of the most electric moments of the entire festival. At nearly 4 a.m., a crowd gathered around the trio of rapper-singers Katy da Voz e as Abusadas screamed at full volume, “Go f* yourself!”.
The outburst is part of “VTNC”, one of the group’s signature tracks: a punk-hearted, cyber-Brazilian funk anthem that had even drawn police harassment to the artists’ concerts(a reminder that in Brazil, music made by marginalized artists functions as the new punk). For Katy da Voz e as Abusadas, irreverence isn’t an aesthetic decision; it’s a premise of their existence as trans women. “The real craziness is to be ourselves,” Katy tells PopMatters. “Our message has to hit the listener somehow, be it positively, negatively, or sideways”, Palla adds.
Edgar’s Music as an Extension of the Visual Arts
Edgar’s name (formerly Novíssimo Edgar, a stage name he shed as part of an artistic self-update) is associated with various forms of art in his performance: visual arts, rap, music production, fashion… You name it. The boundaries dissolve as soon as he touches them. His work suggests someone who doesn’t see categories so much as a single continuum of expression.
In a curious, almost paradoxical contrast to the riotous maximalism of his visual practice, Edgar’s MADA set was disarmingly simple: a Sampaio Corrêa soccer jersey, a cap, a DJ. His setlist ranged from rap to reggae. The audience was enjoying it, but Edgar wanted more: he even called out the concert-goers’ lack of energy, sparking an enthusiastic reaction and ending the show on a happily more intense note.
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Ana Clara Ribeiro
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