When Alok, the most successful Brazilian DJ of his generation, was brainstorming the concept for his new live show, he considered calling it Rave New World. “But when I asked a gen Z kid, the daughter of my creative director, she made me realise how pretentious my idea was,” he says. “The grownups trying to find an easy way out for all of our problems.” Instead, “I started figuring out that it’s not about a new world, it’s about this world. We need to ‘Rave the World’.”
That new title might still seem trite to some, or hypocritical, coming from someone at the heart of a dance music industry with a heavy carbon footprint from constant flying: when I meet Alok, he’s about to board another plane at a private airport outside São Paulo. But dance music has often had a utopian bent to it, and Alok – who champions Indigenous Brazilians in his work and has partnered with the UN on climate initiatives – is certainly making efforts to better the world.
In the past 15 years, the DJ and producer has moved to the top of the electronic music industry at the same steady pace as his tech-house tracks (such as Hear Me Now, which has nearly a billion Spotify streams). Last year he placed third in DJ Mag’s industry-defining annual ranking of the world’s 100 greatest DJs – the highest-ranked 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 get back to basics, or at least his own idea of less is more.
With acid synths and gritty “slap house” – an echo of the music that dominates car-audio culture in Brazil’s central-west – Alok performs beneath the Rave Box, a 3D screen the size of a shipping container that conjures dancers and flashes up carpe-diem slogans. “Rave the World is a reconnection with my essence,” he says, going back to the “various timbres and synths that I used back in psytrance”, the style he started out with in his teens.
Alok grew up commanding psytrance dancefloors at Universo Paralello, one of Latin America’s biggest open-air raves, founded by his father, Juarez Petrillo, also a DJ. (In October 2023, Petrillo had franchised his party out to the Supernova festival in Israel, and was there when the event was attacked by Hamas. “The war is a tragedy, and I can’t tie it to electronic music,” Alok says. “My father survived a traumatic experience, and he still carries the weight of the people who died there.”)
After his grounding at Universo Paralello, Alok started playing in the psytrance duo Lógica with his twin brother. In 2010, when Alok was 19, they “had some requests to play abroad”, but once the duo reached London they couldn’t get a gig. “I knocked on many doors and there was this club whose owner told me: we don’t want DJs, but we want bartenders.” Rave the World’s debut UK performance was recently at Brixton Academy, in the same neighbourhood that almost crushed his dreams of becoming a pro.
After a couple months of serving drinks, he moved back to Brazil, where he made a decisive turn towards a more mainstream sound. But he struggled with depression, including when he first reached the top of Brazil’s DJ scene aged 24. “I fell into this existential void and went searching for answers,” he says, holding up his phone – its wallpaper is a seemingly AI-generated image of a man and a boy embracing. “It’s me and myself as a child. That feeling of embracing myself, holding myself, you know?”
He used electronic music “to join forces with other movements” and made particular efforts to connect with Brazil’s Indigenous peoples, who number 1.7 million across the country. For his debut album, The Future is Ancestral, Alok brought together more than 50 artists from different ethnic groups, blending traditional chants and instruments with easy-listening drum patterns and catchy EDM beat drops. The LP was released in 2024, but the idea took root a decade earlier, when he traveled to the Yawanawá people in northern Brazil and took part in rites such as an ayahuasca ceremony. He says his goal with the album was “to shift the spotlight on to the Indigenous people. It’s about them speaking about their own culture, and not some white guy, once again, telling the story.”
The Future is Ancestral material took centre stage at his November 2024 concert in Belém, a stadium show marking the one-year countdown to Cop30, held in the same city the following year. “We zeroed out the carbon there; we offset the carbon at all my events,” claims Alok, who was recently named a global goodwill ambassador for the UN Environment Programme: his nonprofit, according to its website, donated £5.4m to climate, Indigenous people and human development since it was founded in 2020.
The carbon emissions from Alok’s shows are offset through a partnership with Latin American company Solví, who capture and treat biogas produced at landfill sites. So for every tonne of CO2 Alok’s events emit, the scheme intends for an equivalent amount – as decided via a carbon credit scheme – to be offset by methane being trapped before it escapes, and converted into renewable energy. Offsetting schemes like this are endorsed by the UN as a complement to actual emission cuts, though some experts dismiss the practice as ineffectual and a form of greenwashing; some artists have gone further with their sustainability efforts, such as Massive Attack, who created a 2024 festival using only renewable energy and discouraged fans from using cars to get there, let alone planes.
I ask Alok about his own emissions. He gives the example of a day like today, when he has rented a private jet to fly between two shows: “To do just one [show]: I don’t agree with that, you know? There’s still a way to do this mindfully. Like, I don’t have my [own] plane any more,” he says. “I offset my emissions, but I didn’t stop emitting. I’ve looked into sustainable aviation fuel, but nothing will change as long as the system resists it.”
AI is another existential issue Alok wants to address: at Coachella in 2025, he performed Keep Art Human, a show where 50 dancers executed a precise choreography that replaced big screens and pyrotechnics. “AI as a tool is not a problem,” says Alok. “But it also brings comfort, and art is not about comfort, it’s about confrontation. Through music we shape society too, and we can’t delegate this to AI.”
He is also critical of the superstar DJ culture that dominates electronic music today. While he has nearly 29m Instagram followers, “I’ll never be in favour of turning DJs into gods,” he says in a calm, sage-like manner. “We’re here in service, all the time.”
He recalls meeting Sadhguru, the Indian spiritual leader and founder of the Isha Foundation. “He told me: ‘If you set out to save the world with dirty hands, you’ll get everything dirty. First you have to be right with yourself, before you can carry out your mission.’” I ask Alok whether he might ever become a leader of this sort. “No way,” he says, and vanishes through the airport gate.