With 1973’s Índia, the samba singer Gal Costa cemented her status as one of Brazil’s biggest and most defiant stars, collaborating with Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil in the process.
Brazilian samba singer Maria da Graça Costa Penna Burgos’ career began in 1965 and took off as the decade went on. While she released her first single as Maria Da Graça, she soon shortened her name further to Gal Costa, and found herself working with a vibrant new generation of singer-songwriters in her country, like Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, and his sister Maria Bethânia. She recorded an album of breezy bossa nova duets with Veloso in 1967, which served as both of their debut albums.

Soon after, Costa became a part of the revolutionary musical movement known as Tropicália. And by 1969, Gal was one of the most potent and popular voices in that group, scoring nationwide hits like “Divino, Maravilhoso” and “Não Identificado” while also pushing her sound to the extremes of psychedelic rock. (See the second album she released that year, Gal, for a dose of some of the era’s wildest sound.) As Caetano Veloso put it in his memoir Tropical Truth, Costa’s voice transformed from soft and dulcet to “incorporating vocal sounds that included both Janis Joplin’s grunts and the cries of James Brown.”

But by the early years of the 1970s, Tropicália as a movement was extinguished, as Costa’s key collaborators Gil and Veloso were first imprisoned and then exiled to England until 1972. Despite that, Costa’s star was ascendant—so much so that, across from her Rio home, a stretch of beach where the hippies hung out to smoke weed was deemed “Gal’s dune.” Costa’s 1973 album Índia cemented her status as one of Brazil’s biggest and most defiant stars, from its government-banned cover image to its closing cover of the standard “Desafinado.” With it, Costa paid tribute to her country’s musical heritage while also bravely forging ahead in the post-tropicalismo era, one increasingly repressed by the military regime running the country.

Índia finds Costa drawing upon her past and pushing deeper into Brazilian mainstream pop (often shortened to MPB). Gil served as musical director and guitarist, while Veloso penned two songs. The show-stopping title track—arranged by Rogério Duprat, the “George Martin” of Tropicália—reveals an orchestral lushness not heard since Costa’s 1967 debut. Costa’s voice moves from a simmering murmur entwining with woodwinds to an impassioned cry at the soaring refrain. As penned by José Asunción Flores and Manuel Ortiz Guerreiro, the song was originally written from a male perspective. But in covering it, Costa keeps the feminine pronoun intact, singing “India of brown skin, with her little mouth I want to kiss.” Later that year, she shared a kiss onstage with fellow MPB superstar Maria Bethânia, a moment that author Rudi Bleys wrote in Images of Ambiente: Homotextuality and Latin American Art, 1810-today, “paved the way for a lesbian coming-out in music.”

That Costa was emboldened in the face of repression is evident from the very cover of the album. Censored by the authorities of the Brazilian military regime soon after its release and instead housed in a plain blue sleeve, Índia’s cover may no longer shock, but it still startles. In the intervening decades of empowered female pop stars—from Millie Jackson to Madonna, Lil’ Kim to Rihanna—has any one of them baldly put their bikini-clad camel toe front and center on an album as Costa did back in 1973?

“Milho Verde” updates a Portuguese folk song with a battery of Brazilian hand percussion and multiple layers of Costa’s voice. Her strange juxtaposing of vocals comes over as akin to Veloso’s own abstract sound poetry album Araçá Azul from the same year. Veloso himself contributes the slinking ballad “Da Maior Importância” and bandoneon-bounce of “Relance” and also recommended the eloquent “Volta” by early 20th-century composer Lupicínio Rodrigues to Costa (he himself would cover the song as a single two years later). The funk vamp “Pontos De Luz,” arranged by Brazilian composer Arthur Verocai, will no doubt sound familiar to beatheads—it was sampled by the likes of Madlib, and its snaking beat helped a robot learn to boogie on Kaytranada’s “Lite Spots.” Índia ends with a nimble take on Tom Jobim’s classic “Desafinado,” Costa’s voice a perfect vessel for the bossa nova standard.

The rest of the album perhaps doesn’t push boundaries like the cover photo and title track, but after the outrageous psychedelia of albums like 1969’s Gal, where else could she go? Instead, Índia revealed Costa to be an elegant interpreter of others’ songs, a trajectory that has subsequently made her a superstar in her home country. It shows that a former tropicalista like Costa could do more than just shock and astound; she could also seduce.