On a routine grocery shopping trip, 12-year-old Ludmilla decided to become a singer. While accompanying her mom, a DVD of a Beyoncé performance that played in the store enchanted a young Ludmilla. She bought a copy of the DVD, watched it at home, and thought: “How can someone do all that at the same time? I want to do that!”
Born and raised in the municipality of Duque de Caxias in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Ludmilla started her career by singing rhymes and sporadic lyrics over Brazilian funk beats at neighborhood parties. Taking inspiration from her biggest idol, Ludmilla’s first stage name was MC Beyoncé. It was a time when Brazilian funk — produced by Rio’s Black and brown kids, especially Black girls who used the genre to make themselves heard — was blowing up in Brazil. In “Fala Mal de Mim” (“Talk Your Shit”), her first single, released in 2013, she scream-sings over a traditional funk carioca beat.
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"A household name in Brazil, Ludmilla — whose music ranges from Brazilian funk to samba and pagode — is not only well-known but also widely loved by millions."
nicole froio
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Almost 11 years later, Ludmilla spoke with Refinery29 Somos over the phone as she prepared for her first-ever Coachella performance from Rio de Janeiro, where she currently lives with her wife. By performing in a festival that has inaugurated and solidified so many influential artists’ careers, Ludmilla launched herself internationally to a new public — with the approval of Queen Bey herself. She opened her set on Sunday, April 14, with an audio note from Beyoncé: “From Rio, Brazil, all the way down to Coachella… Ludmilla.” The voice of Brazilian trans activist and politician Erika Hilton followed, urging against any kind of discrimination during the performance. And like that, the pop star started her North American career with a bang.
A household name in Brazil, Ludmilla — whose music ranges from Brazilian funk to samba and pagode — is not only well-known but also widely loved by millions. With 17 million monthly listeners on Spotify, Ludmilla was the first Black Latin American artist to reach one billion streams on the app — so it isn’t surprising that she trusts her art will captivate a wide American audience without the need for her to adapt her current music or translate her lyrics.
“Putting together a show for Coachella has been really incredible, but I’m not adapting the performance I usually deliver for the United States,” Ludmilla explained. “I am truly taking what I do here in Brazil to [Coachella] because the producers saw my concerts and said, ‘We want this show in the festival.’ So I’m taking Brazilian music, funk, and I'm going to play pagode, too, on a Coachella stage. I’m taking a bit of Brazilian culture to the festival.”
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Pagode is a subgenre of samba, a variation of the national Brazilian sound that grew from the Black communities of Rio de Janeiro. In 2020, Ludmilla released her first pagode EP, Numanice (the title is hard to translate as it’s Brazilian Portuguese wordplay, but it basically means to be on a good vibe), surprising critics with her versatility as a songwriter and her range as a singer.
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"Putting together a show for Coachella has been really incredible, but I’m not adapting the performance I usually deliver for the United States. I am truly taking what I do here in Brazil to [Coachella]."
Ludmilla
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“I hope to captivate the same kind of audience I have here in Brazil, which are mostly young people from 18 years old to…,” Ludmilla trailed off because her fans are hard to characterize in neat categories. “Thing is, my audience here in Brazil is so big. I certainly have older fans, too, and kids, despite never having done anything for kids specifically. So I hope to captivate an audience who listens to pop music.”
The fact that 28-year-old Ludmilla is so popular in Brazil — and across different generations, classes, and races — is the result of her being in a highly visible position from an early age. Ludmilla enters the American music industry as an openly bisexual Black popstar who very publicly dated and then married her backup dancer Brunna Gonçalves, an influencer in her own right. In June 2019 when Ludmilla came out as queer and revealed her relationship with her dancer — who she married later that year in December — she lost brand deals as a direct consequence. But today, as she breaks ground in a new industry, she is unrepentantly and publicly living her truth, thanks, in part, to the support of her fans.
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“It’s so great to hear how women who love women in Brazil were impacted by my coming out,” Ludmilla said. “A lot of women come up to me and tell me how impactful it was in their lives, and that’s so gratifying because I had to really perform an act of courage to be who I really am and to come out to the whole of Brazil. The move to a new industry won’t change how we live our lives. My audience likes to see us living our authentic lives and that will continue in this new phase of my career.”
Ludmilla’s music wouldn’t be the same had she hidden a major part of herself. Being with her wife has enriched her art. Starting in 2019, she began to write songs about queer love and sex, explicitly describing the pleasure she takes bedding her wife. In “Maldivas,” a pagode song Ludmilla wrote during their honeymoon in the Maldives, she sings about whole nights of sex, love, and tenderness. And her fans love it.
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"It’s so great to hear how women who love women in Brazil were impacted by my coming out. A lot of women come up to me and tell me how impactful it was in their lives, and that’s so gratifying because I had to really perform an act of courage to be who I really am and to come out to the whole of Brazil."
Ludmilla
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Because of her own career as an influencer, Gonçalves’s performances in Ludmilla’s shows aren’t as consistent as they once were. When Gonçalves does take to the stage, complying with fan requests, the crowd becomes hysterical.
“I’m taking my whole family to see me perform at Coachella,” Ludmilla said. “I couldn’t leave my family out of this moment when I start my international career. And Brunna will be dancing on the Coachella stage, too.”
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As Ludmilla expands to the United States, Beyoncé continues to look for inspiration in Black genres, including in Brazil. In Beyoncé’s new album, Cowboy Carter — which Ludmilla describes as “adventurous” and “less danceable” but nonetheless “so interesting”— she sampled a Brazilian funk track called “Aquecimento das Danadas” (“Naughty Girls’ Warm Up”) for the song “Spaghetti.” Originally created by DJ O Mandrake and DJ Xaropinho, the sample is effectively Queen Bey giving the genre her approval. While American artists taking inspiration from Brazilian funk is nothing new, Beyoncé dabbling with the genre is the ultimate validation.
“Brazilian funk has always been consumed outside of Brazil. For it to reach someone I consider the greatest living artist, it’s very gratifying because funk has always been a really marginalized genre. We’ve been fighting to change that perception, to show people that it isn’t like that,” Ludmilla said, referring to how stigmatized Brazilian funk is because of its Black origins and explicit sexual content that isn’t well-received in a conservative, majority-Christian society. “So to see Beyoncé work with funk is amazing; it shows we are on the right path.”
For the time being, Ludmilla will focus on stepping outside her comfort zone to conquer a new music industry, which requires her to learn English and Spanish. Her latest release, “Piña Colada,” is her first song in Spanish — an adventurous attempt to captivate listeners in Spanish-speaking Latin America and other Latines in the U.S.
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"I’m living my best era, mentally, physically, and in terms of streams."
ludmilla
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“I know I will encounter a lot of obstacles moving forward,” Ludmilla said. “The first obstacle is leaving my comfort zone because I’m doing very well here in Brazil. I’m at the height of my career. I’m living my best era, mentally, physically, and in terms of streams, so my biggest obstacle is to escape my own comfort and do something new. And the language, I’m trying to learn English, and girl, it’s hard!”
Once the Brazilian pop star becomes more established in the American music industry, she wants to collaborate with the artists she admires: Beyoncé, Bad Bunny (Ludmilla expresses shock that he isn’t bigger in Brazil), Karol G, and Sia are a few of the names she mentions off the top of her head. Ludmilla is dreaming as big as Beyoncé taught her to do when she watched that DVD all those years ago. And who’s to say what Ludmilla can achieve when she has already climbed from Duque de Caxias to Coachella? As Ludmilla says in her song “A Preta Venceu,” the Black girl from Rio won.