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Brazil’s sonic insurgents Deaf Kids have never been interested in fitting neatly into metal, punk, noise, or experimental music. Instead, the trio continues to dismantle genre boundaries with a fearless blend of crushing percussion, electronics, global musical traditions, and uncompromising political commentary.
We caught up with drummer and multi-instrumentalist Marian Sarine to discuss the band’s latest album, its critique of technology, capitalism, colonialism, and the future, as well as the gear behind its immersive soundscapes. From Robert Anton Wilson’s “reality tunnels” to Afro-Brazilian rhythms and cyber-enhanced divinities, Marian offers an in-depth look at one of Deaf Kids’ most ambitious releases to date.
The new album is described as a visceral diagnosis of a world intoxicated by its own fictions of power. What specific social, political, or cultural dynamics inspired that concept, and how did you translate those ideas into sound?
I think the album deals mostly with the stage of neoliberalism and capitalism that we’re in, specifically when it comes to technology and our relationship with it. The idea of the title, which in English would be something like “Scars of the Future,” refers to the scars that are yet to come, but at the same time it also refers to the scars that the future, as a concept, causes.
It’s about our relationship with social media and how it has eroded public discourse. For example, in Brazil we have a gambling epidemic that’s rooted technologically, in the sense that gambling is now directly connected to cell phone usage. You no longer have to go to a physical place to gamble, and at the same time it’s global because of the companies hosting these platforms. That makes it much harder to regulate and tax. It also deals with our relationship with ourselves. Of course, all of this happens differently in a colonized country or in the Global South. Those are more or less the aspects we wanted to address.
Deafkids’ music has always been very sensorial in the sense that it doesn’t depend on understanding the lyrics to make sense. The idea was to express these concepts through the combination of primordial sounds from Brazilian musical traditions, world music traditions, and percussion-based music, while combining them with electronic music and contemporary Brazilian electronic styles like funk. The idea is that this primordial reality is intertwined with the technological stage we currently live in.
The album explores systems of psychological, social, and material domination. Were there particular books, thinkers, historical events, or contemporary realities that informed your approach to these themes?
For sure. In my case, and Douglas’ as well, Robert Anton Wilson and his idea of reality tunnels—fabricated realities reinforced through specific vocabularies has been very influential. Eduardo Galeano’s The Open Veins of Latin America also informed previous works. But mostly it comes from observing what’s happening around us—post-colonial realities, how big tech companies influence public discourse and intervene in it directly.
That has a lot to do with how the genocide in Palestine has been broadcast and the struggle to control the narrative. The discussion around the U.S. buying TikTok, understanding that TikTok itself functions as a propaganda machine while applying many of the same data-harvesting techniques used by Meta, also plays into it. I think our criticism is informed more by material reality and our perception of it than by any single school of thought.
This is your first non-collaborative full-length since Metaprogramação. What did returning to a purely Deafkids creative process allow you to do differently?
I think we were missing that for a long time. We released non-collaborative material in the meantime, but they weren’t really studio albums. During the pandemic we weren’t living in the same city, so we were sending each other lo-fi recordings and collaborating remotely. Returning to the studio and treating the studio itself as an instrument was really important. Both Douglas and I play with many different people and improvise in a lot of different contexts. We also have solo projects.
Working with Patrick or Test, for example, allowed us to complement what they were already doing. They already had incredible drummers, so I could add percussion or additional drum layers. Douglas plays percussion, wind instruments, and guitar, so we complement each other naturally because we’re both multi-instrumentalists. Coming back to our own vision was important.
Patrick and Test are metal bands in different ways, but Deafkids was never really a metal band. We’re more like this punk thing that spiraled into madness and cyber-Latinity. Returning to something that is completely ours—more frantic, more percussion-driven—was something we’d wanted to do for a long time, and it finally came together in 2025.
The record balances themes of violence, toxicity, and collective trauma with what you describe as a desire to live and resist. How important is hope or transformation within Deafkids’ artistic vision?
It’s extremely important. Even our use of these primordial sounds points toward forces humanity has known for millennia. More than just the sounds themselves, it’s about the social aspect of music. These traditions are built collectively. Whether it’s claves, Indian talas, or Arabic maqams, these are collective conventions—shared rules people build upon together. Even though the lyrical content and much of the music carries desperation, it’s also frantic because it expresses a will to live.
We feel connected to many different musical traditions—from American folk guitar like John Fahey to spiritual jazz. Even in their most peaceful moments, they express an indomitable spirit. That’s what we want to connect with.
The album is described as both computational and hypnotically danceable. What role do physical movement, rhythm, and ritual play in processing the darker themes present in your music?
They play a huge role. Coming from Brazil influences us deeply, especially through traditions built around the relationship between body and mind. If you think about a Catholic church, the idea of rapture is leaving the body through the mind. In many Afro-Brazilian religions, it’s the opposite. The body enters a trance that transforms the mind, showing they’re inseparable.
We’ve always treated rhythm as groove, but with all the additional percussion and electronic beats, that connection has become much more explicit. Our music is meant to be experienced physically. Even if you’re not literally dancing, it should hit you like dance music, even when it’s abrasive or aggressive.
You mentioned the scars of a brutally stolen past reflected in a wicked future. How does the history of Brazil and Latin America shape the narrative of the album?
It shapes everything. Our culture is simultaneously European, African, and Indigenous, but because it’s all of those things, it’s also none of them completely. It’s an identity built from fractures. I like to imagine it like two riverbanks separated by water but still connected through the river itself.
Our colonial past—and present—is always present in what we do, especially because we’re exploring Brazilian music. We’re also examining the mental structures that prevent people from building a communal relationship with their own land. In Brazil, people often feel like foreigners to themselves, constantly identifying with somewhere else. Recreating a sense of belonging begins with recognizing our own scars.
Many listeners associate Deafkids with refusing to stay within genre boundaries. At this point in your career, do you still think in terms of genre?
Not really. We’ve completely moved beyond that. We’re not trying to sound like any specific style. Our aesthetic uses recognizable sounds as starting points rather than destinations. You’ll hear Afro-Latin claves, Brazilian rhythms, and references to many different traditions. The first song has drums that evoke boi music, while the bass and guitar feel more Moroccan or Malian. The idea is to build bridges between different musical traditions and philosophies instead of belonging to one specific genre.
Your music combines electronics, samplers, percussion, and heavily processed sounds in a unique way. What gear or production techniques were most important in shaping the new record?
Having access to an SPD percussion pad helped tremendously because it allowed me to play organic percussion alongside electronic sounds. That lets you apply human rhythmic feel in ways that are much harder to program. We also used a huge range of percussion instruments—talking drums, tablas, different congas—and treated the studio itself as an instrument.
Post-processing was essential. Running sounds through effects, radically altering instruments, even octave processing to transform familiar sounds into something entirely different. And of course my Roland TR-8 drum machine. Most, if not all, of the electronic kick drums came from it, so it plays a huge role in the sound of the record.
If the new album were a mysterious ritual that accidentally opened a portal, what would be the first thing to come through—and would Deafkids immediately sample it for the next record?
That’s an interesting one. I think it would be some kind of cyber-enhanced divinity—an entity representing both our connection to the land, not literally the physical land but the deeper concept of it, while also embracing augmented technological possibilities. And yes, we’d definitely sample it.
Well, Mariano, thank you so much for your time. Do you have any final thoughts you’d like to share with everyone watching, listening, and reading?
First of all, thank you for the opportunity, and thanks to everyone who’s checking this out. Scars of the Future is available now on LP, CD, and digital formats through Neurot Recordings. You can also visit our Bandcamp, deafkidspunkx.bandcamp.com, where you’ll find everything else we’ve created. Keep it fresh. Listen to as much music as possible, especially music that’s outside your usual spectrum. The idea is always to give people what they need rather than what they already want. What’s truly new is never anticipated. The new imposes itself on reality.To create something new, we need to blend influences and let them coalesce. Thanks a lot.
With Scars Of The Future, Deafkids continue proving that they’re one of the most adventurous and uncompromising bands operating today. Mariano Sarini’s reflections reveal a group driven not by genre labels, but by ideas—melding ancestral rhythms with cutting-edge electronics to confront technology, colonialism, and the fractured realities of modern life. It’s an album that challenges listeners intellectually while remaining intensely physical, inviting both reflection and movement. If Deafkids have their way, the future may leave scars—but it can also inspire entirely new ways of hearing the world.
Categories: Interviews, News
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