Given the temperatures, it’s an ideal summer song in December.
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Juana Giaimo: Those plain piano chords reflect the enjoyment and lack of responsability of summer vacations. They cool the song down just like being on vacations make the excessively hot weather be enjoyable: you just can’t complain if you are by the pool in long sunny afternoons in between laughs.
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Brad Shoup: For something that longs for endless summer, “Eterno Verão” sure lets the chill in. And that’s fine: I wish fall lasted half the year. A pushed-up piano unleashes jazzy peals, and on the refrain, Mahmundi affects a similar resonance. It’s like a Terence Boylan tune of the mind: yearning and cold and comfortable.
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Thomas Inskeep: Gorgeous piano-anchored Brazilian pop with the slightest of, to my ears, chillwave touches, that gets bolder as it rolls along. Mahmundi’s got a lovely voice, too. On this song, she comes across as the would-be Carole King of MPB.
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Megan Harrington: Summer is never really like this, maybe that’s why we conduct Amnesty during the winter. Of course, knowing full well that it’s a seemingly endless streak of self created moisture, I’m suddenly fantasizing about silk tank tops and the gentlest breezes and evenings that stretch until midnight. “Eterno Verão” is a powerful vision, especially when there’s no predictable misery to prove its lie.
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Alfred Soto: This slinks like early eighties Fleetwood Mac, what with the piano and that excellent guitar break at 2:03. It would be a triumph if its brevity had resonance.
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Jonathan Bogart: The piano, with its gentle lilt but more complex than necessary harmonics, recalls Vince Guaraldi’s jazzy take on samba, and the guitar that shows up halfway through has the burnished tone of late-70s sophisti-pop (Gerry Rafferty and Phil Keaggy are my touchstones, but there are others). But it’s Mahmundi’s voice, unruffled and dispassionate, but tender, that forms the still center of the song, the uniting force that explains why guitar heroics don’t sound out of place in what is otherwise a skeletal mood piece. A year spent listening closely to Portuguese lyrics that aren’t available anywhere online to check my ears against has made me only appreciate all the more her air of reserved passion, a holding back not out of fear or lack of feeling (the romance is all there in the words), but because undemonstrative people deserve their anthems too.
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Will Adams: Canned piano notwithstanding, “Eterno Verão” delivers on its promise, with a lovely guitar solo as its centerpiece.
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Edward Okulicz: The bouncy, sun-kissed soft-rock piano is a lively, welcoming intro, and if “Eterno Verão” were nothing more than a clever collection of 70s AM radio pop tropes, it’d still sound terrific. But it’s got more than that going for it. In its heyday, this was a mostly male genre, so a female voice immediately adds interest, and doubly so because Mahmundi’s is nimble and chalky. The guitar solo is like a cool drink, entering where you might have expected another verse; it’s like a duet partner more than an instrument. And at three and a half minutes it’s the right length too.
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