“Há mais homens enterrados no trabalho do que em covas” (“There are more men buried in work than in graves”), sings Ana Lua Caiano on her new single, and the arithmetic that follows is the song’s engine: one hour at work is one hour less of a life, three hours less, eight hours less, “uma vida a labutar é uma vida a menos” (“a lifetime of labour is a lifetime less”). “Uma Vida A Menos” is the first piece of music from the Lisbon artist’s second album, due in November via Glitterbeat Records, and Caiano has come back angrier and writing with more bite than anything on her 2024 debut.
The whole song is built around a cycle that has no exit: two hours on the bus, eight hours of work, “sem conteúdo, direção e sem sentido, lá teclamos” (“without content, direction, or sense, there we type”), six years to play as a child set against a lifetime at a desk. Then the refusal: “Eu não vou mais trabucar / Não vês que a vida é minha” (“I’m not going to toil no more / Can’t you see this life is mine”), the verb cycling through trabucar, bulir, picar, labutar, the same line coming back harder each time. The song ends as a “sim, sim” chant counting off what everyone is waiting for: “fim-de-semana, folga, férias e feriados” (the weekend, the day off, the vacation, the holiday).
Joana Caiano‘s video stages the song in an office buried under soil, employees printing lettuces and pulling keys off keyboards with chopsticks. The absurdism escalates alongside the music, the white-collar set turning surreal until the labour-rights argument has nowhere left to hide.
Caiano takes the song to WOMAD at Neston Park, on 25 July.
Stream “Uma Vida A Menos” HERE.