Cansei de Ser Sexy

Let’s Make Love And Listen To Death From Above is a song title that knows exactly what it’s doing - promising everything and delivering something completely sideways. This is CSS, Cansei de Ser Sexy, a Brazilian synth-pop band from 2006 that didn’t sound like anything else. Lovefoxxx had this voice that never committed to anything, hovering between playful and mean, between joke and confession.

What stuck with me was how genuinely happy they seemed. Not in the performed way you see in interviews, but in the actual sound - the feeling that these people wanted to be in the room together. It’s not a common thing.

The second album Donkey felt more deliberate, more conscious of itself. People thought they’d peaked with the debut, and maybe they did in some ways, but I still think both records are good. The hunger just moved somewhere else. Less look what we discovered and more look what we can do now.

VBS.TV made a documentary about them with Intel for The Creators Project, and it’s worth finding if you’re into how the internet fundamentally changed what a small band could do in the mid-2000s. Mostly it’s a time capsule. It marks that moment when pop could still be joyful and weird at the same time, before everything got so careful. CSS was doing that as well as anyone.