Music of Brazil: Samba, Bossa Nova, Funk, Sertanejo and Forró Explained

Brazil's music runs on rhythm. Most of its great styles were born where African rhythms met Portuguese song, and a country the size of a continent let each region grow its own: samba in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, forró in the Northeast, sertanejo in the farmland of the interior, funk in the favelas of Rio. Many outsiders know Brazil through bossa nova or the Carnival parade, but Brazilians themselves stream and sing a much wider range. This guide explains the main styles and then looks at what is at the top of Brazil's chart this season.

The short answer

• Samba is the root of much of Brazilian popular music, born in Afro-Brazilian communities of Bahia and Rio around 1900; its first landmark record, “Pelo Telefone”, came out in 1917.
• Bossa nova is a quiet, guitar-led samba from late-1950s Rio, and many of its songs became jazz standards.
• Sertanejo is the most popular genre in the country and the most played on Brazilian radio since the 1990s.
• Funk carioca, or baile funk, is Rio's hip-hop-influenced beat, and it fills Brazil's chart today.

Samba, the Carnival and pagode

Samba is less one style than a family of rhythms with roots in West African music, which grew in the Afro-Brazilian communities of Bahia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its branches include samba de roda, the circle samba of Bahia, and the urban samba of Rio de Janeiro. The word first meant a popular dance; only in the 1910s did it come to name a musical genre, with “Pelo Telefone” in 1917 as its starting point. Today samba is one of the symbols of Brazil, and its biggest stage is the Rio Carnival, where each samba school parades with hundreds of drummers and thousands of dancers.

Pagode began in Rio as a branch of samba. The word first meant a party with food, music and dance. The genre took off in the late 1970s and early 1980s: in 1978 the singer Beth Carvalho heard it, loved it and recorded songs by Zeca Pagodinho and others, and the group Fundo de Quintal added new instruments to the samba circle. Pagode is still very much alive, as the chart further down shows.

Bossa nova, MPB and Tropicália

Bossa nova, new wave or new trend, appeared in Rio in the late 1950s. It took the rhythm of a samba school's drums and folded it into the fingers of one guitarist, with soft vocals and unusual, shifting chords. Its first record was the 1958 album Canção do Amor Demais, on which Elizeth Cardoso sang songs by Antônio Carlos “Tom” Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, among them “Chega de Saudade”, with João Gilberto on guitar. Gilberto's own album Chega de Saudade followed in 1959 and set the style. In 1964 Gilberto, Jobim and the American saxophonist Stan Getz released Getz/Gilberto, which won at the Grammy Awards and made bossa nova famous worldwide.

After bossa nova came MPB, música popular brasileira: urban popular music that went back to samba, baião and other regional styles and crossed them with jazz and rock. Its great names include Chico Buarque, Elis Regina, Jorge Ben Jor, Djavan, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, and its songs are known for rich harmony and literary lyrics. Inside MPB, a short but influential movement called Tropicália shook things up in the late 1960s. Led by musicians from Bahia, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa and Tom Zé, together with the band Os Mutantes, it mixed Brazilian and African rhythms with psychedelic rock and pop. Its manifesto was the 1968 album Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis.

Forró, axé and the music of the Northeast

In the Northeast, forró is a genre, a rhythm, a dance and the party where all three happen. Its classic trio is an accordion, a zabumba drum and a triangle. Luiz Gonzaga, who lived from 1912 to 1989, carried the music of the Northeast to the whole of Brazil and made its baião rhythm a national sound. Forró is at its biggest during the June festivals, it has a following as far away as Europe, and Brazil recognised it as cultural heritage in 2021. A newer offshoot, pisadinha, born in the interior of Bahia, strips the music down to an electronic keyboard and a voice; it took off across the country around 2019.

Salvador, the capital of Bahia, gave Brazil another sound in the 1980s: axé, a Carnival music that mixes Afro-Caribbean styles such as reggae and calypso with Brazilian ones such as frevo and forró. Its name comes from a Yoruba word for spiritual power and good energy.

Sertanejo: the sound of the radio

Sertanejo grew out of the country music of the São Paulo interior and the caipira culture of rural Brazil. It is the most popular genre in the country, above all in the South, the Southeast and the Centre-West, and it has been the most played music on Brazilian radio since the 1990s. Many of its stars are duos, often brothers, singing in close harmony. Since the mid-2000s a lighter, pop-influenced branch called sertanejo universitário, college sertanejo, has brought it to younger listeners, and the Latin Grammy Awards give it a category of its own.

Funk carioca and what Brazil plays now

Funk carioca, also called baile funk or just funk, comes from Rio de Janeiro. It grew from Miami bass and freestyle into a hard, rapped and chanted style of its own; the baile is the party where it is played, not the music itself. Born in Rio's poorer neighbourhoods, it spread to working-class audiences across Brazil. Its singers usually go by MC and its producers by DJ.

SORI copies YouTube Music's weekly top songs chart for Brazil, and on 2 October 2026 funk owned it. Six of the top ten songs were led by an MC or a DJ, from number one, “Díario de um Cafajeste” by Dj Oreia with MC Tuto and Mc Negão Original, down through Mc Jacaré, MC Vine7, DJ Japa NK, MC Lele JP and Mc J9. At number three was “JETSKI” by Pedro Sampaio, a singer, producer and DJ born in 1997. The pagode group Menos É Mais, formed in 2016 in Gama in the Federal District and known for reworking old songs, sat at number seven with a live recording, and the rapper Oruam closed the top ten.

The chart and the bars above tell two different stories. Readers abroad come to Brazil through bossa nova and samba; at home, Brazilians are streaming funk, pagode and rap. Both are Brazil.

Where to start listening

Start with a samba school's drums at Carnival, then the guitar of João Gilberto to hear how bossa nova shrank that rhythm into one instrument. Go on to MPB and the Tropicália album of 1968, then travel north for Luiz Gonzaga's baião and a night of forró. Finish in the present: a live pagode set, a sertanejo duo, and the funk that sits at the top of the chart this week.