Pop music in 2003, when the band Cansei de Ser Sexy was formed in São Paulo by a group of friends, was marked by a particular turn-of-the-millennium vibe: glittery, bright, experimental and expressive, defined by DIY ethics and not a small note of debauchery.
The moment was fleeting. And Cansei de Ser Sexy’s lead singer, Lovefoxxx, assumed the band’s existence would be similarly brief.
“I didn’t expect it to last for two months,” she says on Zoom from her home in São Paulo. “I just thought to myself, ‘If this band lasts for one show and I’m not there dancing, onstage and performing, I’m going to feel a lot of FOMO.’”
She ended up dancing and performing onstage with CSS for a decade before the group stopped touring in 2013.
The vibrant singer (born Luísa Matsushita) kept busy during CSS’s 11-year hiatus; she became a full-time painter, bought land in a beach town on Brazil’s southern coast, built earthships and learned about permaculture (using her airline miles from touring) in far-flung places. The possibility of another tour wasn’t on her radar until a British promoter nudged her and the band to consider a reunion.
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Now the quartet is dusting off hits like “Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death From Above” and “Music Is My Hot Hot Sex” (you might remember the latter from a viral iPod commercial) for a farewell tour that will take them across the United States and Europe, retracing routes worn by their years of party rocking. Lovefoxxx is most excited for the smell.
“American venues, old venues, sometimes they have a certain smell from the construction or something,” she says. “I want to feel this smell and to revisit places. Everything changed so much because for me, this [break] feels like three years. But it’s been a lifetime.”
It certainly has. In the years since CSS (named for a translation of a Beyoncé quote about how she was “tired of being sexy”) stopped performing live, the band has been embraced by nostalgic TikTokers who’ve rebranded the sound of the mid-2000s as “indie sleaze.” Lovefoxxx says the title resonates.
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“From all the labels we’ve had, this one translates best the era and the energy,” she says. “It translates the humor of the time. … CSS was always a place where we put this silly energy first.”
Share this articleShareThat’s just another way she’s been thinking about her group’s legacy, which — among the fun, flirty degeneracy — is also inextricably tied to the era of file sharing when music moved freely online between the lucky few who stumbled upon it or sought it, not served by an algorithm.
“I feel that the connection that people had with us was finding something special,” Lovefoxxx says. It was part of what made the early aughts “the right moment, the right time for us.”
So besides a pungent dressing room, how do you relive that experience? Lovefoxxx isn’t trying to, but the tour is weighing on her, since she suspects it will probably be the band’s last. She says she’s been crying in the days leading up to our call, and she’s crying now. They seem to be mostly happy tears.
“I would like to be anchored in the moment rather than living in the past. I’m not going to be a caricature of what I used to be,” she says. “It’s nice to finish off with a lot of life involved and not just fall apart. We’re going to finish in a very enthusiastic way, which is very CSS.”
May 3 at 8 p.m. at the Black Cat, 1811 14th St. NW. blackcatdc.com. $30-$35.
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