Brazilian Girls return in 2018 with Let’s Make Love, their first album since 2008. Formed in 2003, the group—Sabina Sciubba (lead vocals, electronics), Jesse Murphy (bass, vocals), Didi Gutman (keyboards, vocals), Aaron Johnston (drums, percussion, vocals)—was born after the four members crossed paths at East Village club Nublu. “Somehow we all ended up at Nublu on a Sunday and it all came together,” says Johnston. The band began playing Nublu weekly, embracing a free-form ethos that helped shape their kaleidoscopic sound. “A lot of the spirit of the band comes from being so open to improvise like that,” says Murphy. Fast earning attention for their euphoric live show—and winning fans like Zach Galifianakis, who later cast Sciubba as a regular on Baskets—Brazilian Girls released their self-titled debut in 2005 and sophomore album Talk to La Bomb in 2006.
Produced by longtime Brazilian Girls collaborator Frederik Rubens, Let’s Make Love came to life over the course of several years. Since they’re now scattered throughout the U.S. and Europe, the four band members assembled when possible to write and record, piggybacking those sessions onto gigs in Istanbul and Madrid and Paris and New York. Despite the distance, Brazilian Girls consistently found their chemistry as kinetic as when they first started out. “It’s a little astounding to us because we’ll go so long without playing, and then we get together and things just happen in this very harmonious way,” says Sciubba.
Brazilian Girls bring a woozy romanticism to many tracks on Let’s Make Love. Opening the album with lead single “Pirates,” Sciubba notes of the
modern-age new wave love song, “It’s a song about how we should all sleep more and sleep more together. It would change everything. Actually
that's what the whole record is about. It may even be the true meaning of life." The album gets its title from a glorious anthem at the heart of the
album. Like much of their latest record, the frenetic yet ethereal “Let’s Make Love” takes a more classically arranged form than the band’s earlier
work. At the same time, both album and title track embody the quintessential spirit of Brazilian Girls: their strange balance of wildness and elegance, cheeky humor and fractured poetry, soulful mystique and libertine wisdom. “Right now ‘Let’s Make Love’ seems like a very good message to put into the world,” says Sciubba of the song’s inspiration. “It’s not even ‘Make love, not war’—it’s just ‘Make love,’ and nothing else.”