Os Mutantes Talk First Album in 30 Years, Hugo Chavez and Almost Opening for Nirvana

For most songwriters, the process of creating new music takes time and patience. But for Sergio Dias, who has just released his first album in over three decades years with Os Mutantes, songwriting was more like "spontaneous combustion."

Os Mutantes has seen a wild resurgence of late. After fading out of the public eye around 1978 after a 12-year run, it seemed like the psych-pop band from Sao Paolo had reached its logical conclustion—not even a personal reunion request from Kurt Cobain in 1993 would push Os Mutantes back together.

But by 2006 the building momentum was impossible to ignore. Os Mutantes co-founder Sergio Dias talked to Paste recently about the decision to reunite, and the need to "be perfectly honest about what we are feeling now and what it was to be like in the 21st century. We’re not the same people we were before." The result of Dias and collaborator Tom Ze's songwriting sessions is Haih Or Amortecedor, out this week on Anti-.

One significant change, said Dias, is that while recording in militaristic Brazil in the 1960s was a dangerous task, Os Mutantes is now free to stir up trouble without worrying about being arrested. "Many times, we were under the menace of being kidnapped or taken from the military. It was hard. Very hard," Dias said of his band's early days. But while that threat has subsided, global politics can still be foreboding.

"The breakdown of the dollar and the economy: We didn’t foresee that," Dias said. "That was done under everybody’s nose and nobody realized it. So who was responsible for this? This is very important for the American people to think about. Who is really the enemy? Who is the bad guy? Because Brazil always had trouble with the economy, we’re used to that, but for America it’s a hard blow."

Os Mutantes never shied from politics (they were often censored in Brazil, but would retain their lyrics at lives hows), and the new record is no exception—one song is even called "Baghdad Blues." The song is "a kind of a journal of everything we know about Baghdad," said Dias.  "A long time ago very close to there were the Babylon gardens. So it’s very hard for us to see suddenly all this pain and destruction."

Read Paste's full conversation with Dias here.

Related links:
News: Os Mutantes to Release First New Album in 35 Years
Mutantes.com
Anti.com

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