Gilsons

A son, two grandsons, and a group formed in 2018

Gilsons is the working name of three members of the Gil family: José Gil, the youngest son of Gilberto Gil, and João Gil and Francisco Gil, both grandsons of the same man. They began working together as a group in 2018, which makes the band a relatively late arrival given how long each of them had been around music through the family. The sound they settled on pulls from pop-rock, samba, reggae and Bahian rhythms, and sits alongside the MPB of their father and grandfather rather than attempting to reproduce it.

Their first release was the EP Várias Queixas in 2019, built around a reworking of an Olodum song of the same name. That reworking did most of the early work of introducing them to a Brazilian audience, and the Bahian thread in it was never decorative — percussion has remained central to how the band is staffed on stage, with atabaques and hand drums carrying arrangements that a smaller group would hand to programming.

Francisco Gil is the son of the singer and presenter Preta Gil. The family connection is not incidental to the group's story, and in 2025 it became the thing that shaped their second record.

Pra Gente Acordar and three years of road work

The debut album Pra Gente Acordar arrived in 2022. It was nominated for a Latin Grammy for Best Contemporary Pop Album in Portuguese Language, and picked up nominations at the Prêmio Multishow and the Prêmio da Música Brasileira, where the group won Best Group in the Pop/Rock category in 2023. A nomination at the MTV MIAW Brasil awards followed the single Proposta in 2022.

The festival work through that period was substantial. They played the Sunset stage at Rock in Rio alongside Jorge Aragão in front of a crowd in excess of 100,000, appeared on the Lollapalooza Brasil bill in 2023, and played Coala. Abroad, the touring reached Argentina, Uruguay, the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands and Ireland. Collaborations in the same stretch ran from Alok, BaianaSystem and Tropkillaz through to Julia Mestre, Lagum, Jota.pê, Rachel Reis and Mulú, which gives some sense of how wide the group's register is.

That cycle was closed off with a live version of Pra Gente Acordar, twenty tracks recorded in August 2023 at the Concha Acústica do Teatro Castro Alves in Salvador. By the band's own accounting the touring behind the debut ran to more than 240 concerts across Brazil, Europe, the United States and Latin America, seen by over two million people.

The year that made the second album

Preta Gil died on 20 July 2025 in New York, aged 50, of colorectal cancer first diagnosed in January 2023 and recurrent from August 2024. Francisco Gil lost his mother in the middle of a heavy touring schedule, and the album the trio then made was not a planned follow-up so much as a by-product of getting through the year. In interviews around its release they described the writing turning towards consolation rather than construction — the record became a place to process rather than a project to execute.

Eu Vejo Luz Em Maior Proporção Do Que Eu Vejo A Escuridão was released on 3 March 2026, four years after the debut. It runs to ten new songs, produced musically by José Gil, and is the first Gilsons record to open the door to guests. Arnaldo Antunes appears, as do Caetano, Moreno and Tom Veloso, Narcizinho of Olodum, Julia Mestre, and the Gambian kora player and multi-instrumentalist Sona Jobarteh. Bem Me Quer is the track with Narcizinho; Minha Flor brings in Antunes and the Veloso family together.

The palette widened with it. Cello, electronic textures and programmed rhythm appear where the first album had none, while the guitars-and-three-part-harmony core stays where it was — the trio have called the move an expansion rather than a revolution. Asked about the difference between making the record and playing it, they have repeated a line from Gilberto Gil: the studio is more scientific, the stage more religious.

Eu Vejo Luz on the road

The touring behind the album was announced as a world run of more than thirty confirmed shows across eleven countries. It opened in Brazil with Salvador at the Concha Acústica on 25 April 2026, Rio de Janeiro at Vivo Rio on 1 May and São Paulo at Espaço Unimed on 9 May, then worked through Brasília on 4 June at the Ulysses Centro de Convenções, a 21:30 start with a 14-plus age rating.

The European leg ran through eleven cities in seven countries in July. It began at Umbria Jazz in Perugia on 10 July, then Copenhagen on the 11th, Madrid on the 12th, Karlsruhe on the 13th and Milan on the 15th, with Cartagena and Martorell on the 17th and 18th, Corsica on the 20th, Koblenz and Munich on the 25th and 27th, and Sète on the 29th.

A second European pass follows the Oceania dates in October — Lisbon at the Coliseu dos Recreios on 17 October, Porto at the Coliseu Porto Ageas on 18 October and Paris at La Seine Musicale on 20 October. The year then returns to Brazil: Vivo Rio again on 13 November, Cine Lido in Curitiba on 19 November, Festival Zepelim in Fortaleza on 21 November, Festival Amazônia Pop in Manaus on 8 December, a New Year's Eve run at Carneiros from 27 December, and Festival Bem Bom in Trancoso on 8 January 2027.

What the reviews have said

The Rio opening at Vivo Rio on 1 May 2026 drew a four-star review. The trio played all ten songs from the new album in a single night, opening with Zumbido, and the critic read the set as confirmation of the progress the record had already shown — describing an authorial repertoire that works as a balm in an era of simplistic pop. The lighting design was built around the album's title, with video, and the write-up singled out the percussionists Luizinho do Jêje and Ricardo Guerra, whose atabaques hold up the arrangements. The audience was noticeably young and filled both the floor and the boxes, though the older first-album material still drew the faster reaction: Love Love picked up a spontaneous singalong, and the encore went back to the 2018 breakthrough.

Overseas reviews have made a similar point about the room rather than the repertoire. A Montreal notice covering the Pra Gente Acordar years described a crowd that was largely Brazilian and thoroughly invested, an extended encore forced by chanting, and the easy interplay between the three of them on stage — along with the resemblance between João Gil's voice and his grandfather's. The band that night was five-strong on stage, with Ricardo Guerra on percussion and Osiel Junior on trumpet, and José Gil moving between guitar, cavaquinho and percussion. The opener was the Toronto-based Brazilian singer JØY Brandt.

Where they stand in September 2026

The next date is Campinas at the Multi Arena on 19 September 2026, ahead of the Australian and New Zealand run that starts at Double Whammy in Auckland on 1 October and returns there on the 11th, taking in the Round House in Sydney on the 3rd, Miami Marketta on the Gold Coast on the 4th, Crown Bar in Brisbane on the 6th, Max Watts in Melbourne on the 7th and the Rosemount Hotel in Perth on the 9th.

That leg is worth noting for its scale. The group play the Coliseu dos Recreios and La Seine Musicale in Europe a week later, but in Australia they are booked into bar-sized and club-sized rooms — a first proper pass at a market where the Brazilian diaspora is smaller and the name is not yet established. João Gil has framed the international work as playing to two audiences at once: Brazilians abroad looking for something familiar, and local listeners arriving at the material cold.

With the second album out, the tour half-run and dates already booked into January 2027, the group are in the strongest position of their eight years — carrying a record that came out of the worst year the family has had.