MOMO.

Fino Coletivo, a journalism degree and a name chosen as a counterweight

Marcelo Elisio Vianna Frota was born on 17 February 1979 and has been playing since 1998, professionally since 2002. His first public footing came with Fino Coletivo, the Brazilian collective he co-founded alongside Wado in the early 2000s; he was part of the first line-up in 2005 and left the group in 2008. He also took a bachelor's degree in journalism, a training that shows in how plainly he explains his own work.

The stage name came from a practical instinct rather than a concept. "I wanted something universal, simple, and light," he told SPIN in August 2026. "The album I was making at the time was quite dark, so the name felt like a good counterpoint." The full stop has stayed attached ever since, which makes him unusually hard to search for and unusually easy to recognise on a sleeve.

Seven albums and five countries

The solo catalogue starts with A Estética do Rabisco in 2006 and runs through Buscador, Serenade of a Sailor and Cadafalso before arriving at Voá in 2015, produced by Marcelo Camelo of Los Hermanos. That same year Frota moved to Lisbon, where the fado singer Camané became a collaborator. The sixth album, I Was Told to Be Quiet, followed in 2019, recorded in Los Angeles with the Grammy-winning producer Tom Biller.

Two things happened within ten days of each other in 2019: his mother died and his daughter was born. He has since named that fortnight as the pressure behind the records that followed. He settled in London in 2021, where he still lives and is working towards a master's in Designing Audio Experiences, and in 2022 toured Europe as part of Alabaster DePlume's band — a useful clue to the company he keeps, since DePlume's circle overlaps heavily with the players Frota now records with.

The back catalogue is also being pulled back into print. The Swedish label Ajabu! is reissuing Cadafalso, his fourth album, and an EP, Sail Your Boat into My Sea, appeared in 2025.

Gira, and the decision to stop working alone

The record that changed his standing outside Brazil was Gira, his seventh, released on Batov Records in October 2024 and cut at Total Refreshment Centre in east London with a six-piece of Brazilian and London jazz musicians. Mojo named it one of its top ten world music albums of 2024, and it made Sounds and Colours' New Year's Honours list.

Frota has described Gira as the point where the method flipped. "For so many years I've been in my room with a guitar," he told Sounds and Colours in June 2026, "but with Gira, instead of the more intimate singer-songwriter, I invited them to join me." Everything since has been built on that change of habit.

Tum Tum Tum: twenty-five minutes, eight tracks, one room

Tum Tum Tum arrived on 19 June 2026 as Agogo Records catalogue number AR187, on LP and digital, and is his first release for the label. It runs eight tracks and a little over twenty-five minutes: Egum Eô, Vermelho e Rosa, Dream of Samba, Morena, Dente D'ouro, Tudo Que Se Tem, Canto de Aldeia and Tranquilo. The band is Thomas Broda on drums, Jim Le Mesurier on percussion, Regis Damasceno on bass, Caetano Malta on guitar and the British jazz trombonist Rosie Turton, with Frota on vocals and guitar. Marcos Valle plays piano on Morena; Nina Miranda of Smoke City co-wrote and sings on the bilingual Canto de Aldeia. The sleeve is by Raissa Pardini and Conor Lumsden.

It was recorded live in South London with the same musicians he had just been on the road with, and the reason given is straightforward. "Now I trust the space more," he told Divine Magazine. "I care more about how musicians listen to each other than about packing in ideas." He has said the players had already "learned how to listen and react to each other" on tour, so the studio work was about catching that rather than correcting it. To Agogo he called the album "a poetic eulogy, a wink, a memory to twenty years of crafting music", and described the onomatopoeic title as standing for continuity — "something that keeps going no matter what". The material is sung in Portuguese and English and pulls on MPB, Tropicália, Afrobeat, folk rock, psychedelia and jazz, which is less a stylistic pitch than a list of the places he has lived: Brazil, Angola, the United States, Spain, Portugal and the UK.

Where the record landed

Reviews have been warm without being uniform. Steve Williams gave it four out of five at UK Vibe on 29 July 2026, tracing the psychedelia back to Os Mutantes and singling out Canto de Aldeia as the high point, "a wash of late-sixties psychedelia", with the closer Tranquilo landing as "pure Marcos Valle" and Tudo que Se Tem "a traditional shape dressed in lush strings". He was blunt about the weak link: Dream of Samba, sung in English, he called "a slow plod of a song" that tips into cheese. He also noted that the sequencing has "the same knack of sliding between styles and moods to keep a room leaning in" — which is a review of a record that reads like a review of a gig.

Jessica Hart's EARMILK review, published on release day, 19 June 2026, made the same point from the other side, praising an ensemble that "favor subtlety over excess" and arrangements where the musicians had room "to shape the direction of a song as it unfolds". The single Egum Eô had gone out ahead of the album on 20 April 2026. SPIN ran a profile on 11 August 2026, and Divine Magazine an interview around the same period, both treating him as a London fixture rather than a visitor.

Autumn 2026

The Tum Tum Tum Tour ran through late September and October 2026: POPUP! in Paris on 24 September, Schorndorf on 25 September, Gretchen in Berlin on 27 September, Hamburg on 28 September, 229 on Great Portland Street in London on 3 October, Sala Roze in Zaragoza on 9 October and Marseille on 16 October. That is a club-level circuit, deliberately so — a reissue campaign, a new label, a Mojo listing and a run of 200-to-500-capacity European rooms.

Nothing further has been announced at the time of writing beyond listings that cannot be reliably attributed to this MOMO. rather than another act of the same name, so the honest position is that the touring picture after mid-October 2026 is open.