In Recife’s Pina neighbourhood, a luxury avenue runs parallel to the Bode community. One side: tower blocks, hotels, restaurants. The other: families lacking sanitation, open sewage, public neglect. Barbarize, the duo of Bárbara Vitória and YuriLumin, emerged from that gap and has been making music from it ever since. “Mangue”, taken from their debut album Manifexta on Selo Estelita, is the sharpest articulation yet of where they stand, and who stands with them. Fred04, founder of Mundo Livre S/A and the man who wrote the 1992 manifesto “Caranguejos com Cérebro” that named the manguebeat movement into existence, is here.
The track opens on a joint chorus: “Mangue Mangue / Josué presente / Mangue Mangue / Chico eternamente.” This invocation brings Brazilian physician, nutritionist and geographer Josué de Castro and musician Chico Science into the present tense as active ideological forces. Castro, the author of The Geography of Hunger, provided the movement with its intellectual foundation by exposing how systemic poverty traps the poor in a biological “cycle of the crab”. Chico Science, the late leader of Nação Zumbi, translated this struggle into a global sonic language.
The production by Thiago Barromeo sets trap and boom-bap rhythms beneath guitar riffs, while percussionist Maurício Bade of Mestre Ambrósio adds a ritualistic pulse to the electronic foundation. A flute sits in the mix, moving between ceremonial melody and street sound. Fred 04 contributes a verse focused on ancestral pride and resilience, reinforcing the connection to the 1990s movement he helped define. The track closes with Josué de Castro’s prose read aloud by Bárbara Vitória: men who resemble crabs in everything, crawling, huddling, moving sideways to survive, trapped in the cycle the mud creates. The passage maps directly onto the 2026 reality of Pina, where the social gap remains as wide as it was when the manifesto first landed.
The clip, directed by Barbarize themselves and shot at Estúdio Estelita, builds an afrofuturist visual world from recycled electronics, body paint, reconstructed garments, and ritual objects, placing the track’s ideological argument inside a frame the duo describes as cyber mysticism, where the natural and the technological are made inseparable.
Manifexta crosses manguebeat, afrobeat, funk and afrotrap across twelve tracks, produced in ten days in São Paulo with Barromeo. “Mangue” is the album’s first visual release of 2026. The mud, as ever in Recife, is where things grow.
Listen to “Mangue” and stream Manifexta following THIS LINK