Pabllo Vittar's 'Lost in Lust' Is Over Before Your Dinner Arrives

One marketing campaign says more about Lost in Lust than any press release. To launch the album, the Brazilian delivery app 99Food asked fans to press play the moment they ordered dinner. By the time the last track faded out, the food would be at the door. It's a clever joke, and it works because the album lasts 29 minutes: twelve tracks, several of them under two minutes. What the campaign leaves out is the punchline. When the doorbell rings, you won't remember a single song.

That's a strange thing to say about one of the biggest pop phenomena Brazil has produced in the past decade. Pabllo Vittar, born Phabullo Rodrigues da Silva in São Luís in 1993, broke through in 2015 with "Open Bar," a Portuguese take on Major Lazer's "Lean On." Two years later "Sua Cara," with Major Lazer and Anitta, racked up 25 million YouTube views in its first 24 hours. Charli XCX put her on two records, and Madonna brought her on stage at Copacabana in front of an estimated 1.6 million people. She has passed RuPaul as the most-followed drag queen on the planet. And her last two albums, the Batidão Tropical records, were a loving tribute to the forró and tecnomelody of Brazil's north and north-east, where she grew up.

Lost in Lust throws most of that overboard. It's her seventh album and the first sung in English and Spanish, released through The Orchard and built for the international club circuit. Rodrigo Gorky, her producer for a decade, leads a team of a dozen LGBTQ+ producers and writers. The concept, Vittar explains, is lust as a constant pressure on the self and the body. It's sequenced as one non-stop set, running from the operatic choir of "FUTURE" to the samba drums of "CARNAVAL."

Twelve mood boards, not twelve songs.

The trouble is what happens in between. Almost every track is a reference rather than a song. "SKIN" borrows its moves from 2000s Britney. "BETTER THAN A FEELING" reaches for Eighties synth-pop. "BIG BANG" is reggaeton by numbers, and "ALONE" throws rave and a burst of screamo at the wall. What you get is twelve mood boards. The hooks are scarce, and the English lyrics are so generic that they could have come from a stock-phrase generator. When lead single "ROCKSTAR" came out in July, one Brazilian fan wrote that her English sounded like a student reading aloud in language class. That's harsh, but it isn't wrong. Even G1, Brazil's biggest news site, asked what made this a Pabllo Vittar album at all. On her own record she's repeatedly upstaged by her guests: Villano Antillano, Urias, Mahmood, La Cruz.

There's an irony here. Vittar's career began with a Portuguese version of someone else's hit. Eleven years later she's back where she started: sounding like other people, only now in their languages too. The few moments that still sound like her are the ones that point home. "BAD GOOD" has a tecnomelody pulse under its techno, and "CARNAVAL" lets the samba percussion breathe. They're the best things here, and that tells you something.

So why is she so big in Brazil? To be fair, her importance there goes well beyond music. Vittar is a drag queen from the poor north-east who topped the charts in a country with one of the world's highest rates of violence against LGBTQ people, and she did it through years of a president who was openly hostile to them. Her fame is a statement, and that deserves respect. Brazilian critics frame this album the same way, calling celebration a form of resistance. But significance isn't a song, and visibility isn't a hook.

Significance isn't a song, and visibility isn't a hook.

The standard defence is that Lost in Lust makes sense on a dance floor at two in the morning, with a sound system that hits you in the chest. Maybe so. Gorky's team certainly know how to program a kick drum, and the production is slick from start to finish. But a record that only works under those conditions is a DJ set, not an album. Played at home, it's a half-hour of expensive-sounding wallpaper.

At least the title is honest. Somewhere in these 29 minutes, Pabllo Vittar got lost in someone else's idea of a global pop star. Your dinner, on the other hand, will arrive warm.