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When Alok, the most successful Brazilian DJ of his generation, was thinking about the idea of his new show, he decided to call it Rave New World. “But when I asked the son of gen Z, the daughter of my chief designer, she made me realize how pretentious my idea was,” he says. “The authorities are trying to find a simple solution to all our problems.” Instead, “I began to think that it is not a new world, but it belongs to this world.”
This new title may seem insulting to some, or hypocritical, from someone at the heart of the dance music industry who has a lot of carbon emissions from constant flying: when I meet Alok, he is about to board another plane at the airport outside of São Paulo. But dance music often has its opposite, and Alok – who wins the Brazilian Indians in his work and has joined the UN on climate action – is certainly trying to improve the world.
In the last 15 years, the DJ and producer has moved to the top of the electronic music industry on the same level of stability as his current methods (such as Hear Me Now, which has almost a billion Spotify streams). Last year he came third in DJ Mag’s annual ranking of the 100 biggest DJs in the world – the top Latin American DJ to date – and played a concert for 2.6 million people on New Year’s Eve in Rio. Now, aged 34, he wants to go back to basics, or at least his idea of less is more.
With acid synths and gritty “slap house” – the sound of music that is popular in the Brazilian midwest – Alok performs under the Rave Box, a 3D screen the size of a shipping container that attracts dancers and highlights the phrase carpe-diem. “Rave the World is reconnecting with my culture,” he says, returning to “the different styles I used in psytrance”, a style he started with as a teenager.
Alok grew up ruling the psytrance dancefloors at Universo Paralello, one of Latin America’s biggest music clubs, founded by his father, Juarez Petrillo, who is also a DJ. (In October 2023, Petrillo allowed his party to the Supernova festival in Israel, and was present when the event was attacked by Hamas. “The war is sad, and I can’t tie it to electronic music,” Alok says. “My father survived a very painful event, and he still carries the weight of the people who died there.”)
After settling in Universo Paralello, Alok started playing in the psytrance duo Lógica with his twins. In 2010, when Alok was 19, “he had offers to play abroad”, but when the two arrived in London they could not get a gig. “I knocked on many doors and there was this club whose owner told me: we don’t need DJs, but we need vendors.” The UK’s Rave the World concert was recently held at Brixton Academy, the same community that almost crushed his dreams of becoming a professional.
After a few months of drinking, he returned to Brazil, where he changed his name to a popular song. But he battled depression, including when he first reached the top as a Brazilian DJ at the age of 24. “I fell into an existential crisis and went looking for answers,” he says, holding up his phone – his wallpaper is a seemingly AI-generated image of a man and a boy hugging. It’s me and myself when I was a child. That self-hugging, self-holding, you know?”
He used electronic music “to connect with other movements” and tried to connect with Brazilians, who number 1.7 million across the country. For his debut album, Tsogolo Ndi Ancestral, Alok brought together more than 50 artists from various genres, combining traditional music and instruments with easy-to-listen drum tracks and exciting EDM drops. The LP was released in 2024, but the idea took hold ten years earlier, when he visited the Yawanawá people in northern Brazil and participated in rituals such as the ayahuasca ceremony. He said his goal with the album was “to arouse the interest of the people of this area. It is for them to talk about their culture, not another white person to tell the story.”
Future and Ancestral took center stage at his November 2024 concert in Belém, a stadium marking the one-year countdown to Cop30, held in the same city the following year. “We decarbonised there; we decarbonised all my activities,” says Alok, who was recently named global ambassador for the UN Environment Programme: the non-profit, according to its website, has donated £5.4m to climate, Indigenous and social development since it was founded in 2020.
The carbon emissions from Alok’s displays are eliminated thanks to a partnership with the Latin American company Solví, which captures and treats the gases produced in landfills. So for every ton of CO2 The events of Alok produce, the plan requires the same money – as has been proposed through the carbon credit scheme – to be solved by the methane that is captured before it is released, and converted into renewable energy. Such mitigation measures are recognized by the UN as a means of reducing actual emissions, although some experts criticize the practice. inactive and green appearance; some artists have gone ahead with their sustainable efforts, such as Massive Attack, who created the 2024 festival using renewable energy and prevented fans from using cars to get there, let alone airplanes.
I ask Alok about his own breath. He gives an example of a day like today, when he has rented a private plane to fly between two shows: “Just doing one (show): I don’t agree with it, you know? There’s a way to do it thoughtfully. Like, I don’t have my (own) plane anymore,” he says. “I slowed down my breathing, but I didn’t stop excreting oil.
AI is another issue that Alok wants to tackle: at Coachella in 2025, he held Keep Art Human, a show in which 50 dancers created a precise choreography that replaced the big screens with pyrotechnics. “AI as a tool is not a problem,” says Alok. “But it also brings comfort, and art isn’t just comfort, it’s struggle. Through music we create a community, and we can’t give that to AI.”
He also criticizes the superstar DJ culture that dominates electronic music today. Despite having nearly 29m Instagram followers, “I wouldn’t like to turn DJs into gods,” he says calmly, like a sage. “We are here in service, always.”
He recalls meeting Sadhguru, an Indian spiritual leader and founder of the Isha Foundation. He told me: ‘If you want to save the world with black hands, you will stain everything. First you have to take care of yourself, to achieve your goal.'” I asked Alok if he could be this kind of leader. “No,” he says, and disappeared through the gate of the airport.
