Joana Rodrigues and Carolina Viana (a.k.a. MALVA) began shaping this path in 2022, after releasing the EP “parte”. At the time, they didn’t yet know they would go on to make an album, but they knew they wanted to keep working together. “We were letting those restlessnesses spill out and, in a way, purging them,” says Carolina. “We didn’t have a clear goal of making a full-length album, but we had the desire.” Joana adds: “We allowed things to emerge at their own pace, without rushing. It was only at the end that we realised we had, in fact, created a full-length record.”

The album bears the name of a prayer, yet it holds more doubts than dogmas. “The saints are paradoxical and distressing thoughts. Ideas that live within us, often controversial, that clash and prick at each other,” they explain. These are mental figures kept under glass domes – not to silence them, but to give them space – “So they can rest in a kind of faith that soothes them.” In the end, this album “is about accepting that we are a well of contradictions – and not accepting that can lead to even greater unrest.”

Each track works as a small capsule of a world. There’s a unique atmosphere in each one, but they are all connected — through words, sound textures, and subtle repetitions hidden in the music. “There are many instrumentals and samples that repeat, even if not in an obvious way,” says Joana, who is responsible for the production. “We wanted that sense of continuity.” Carolina sees the record as a circular journey, a narrative with a beginning and an end, but one that allows returns: “If you go back, you notice other layers.”

The album was built with four hands, but across two worlds — Carolina writes the lyrics and Joana produces the instrumentals. Only later, in the studio, do they begin to step into each other’s fields, searching for the meeting point between what is said and what is heard. “Carolina starts by structuring the lyrics, and that shapes the instrumental,” Joana explains. “That’s when the production begins to respond to what’s being said.”

And what’s said in “santos da minha mente” is far from little. The lyrics are living, poetic matter. Lines like “I’d rather hold myself in my hand than be the hand that didn’t exist” (in santos da minha mente) or “I suffer monthly delusions, mental misdemeanours that anticipate a fatal outpouring” (in delírios mensais) cut through the body with disconcerting verses layered with meaning.