Brazil, belief and breaking the curse: How Karen Dió took over

When Karen Dió was growing up, if the kids were drinking and smoking round by the petrol station, it surely meant one thing: there was a show happening. It was a way of socialising and getting hyped for the night, before heading to the venue round the corner for some high-octane live music.

“It was great,” she recalls of that time. “I knew loads of people from that scene and we basically grew up together. Some of them are still doing music now, which is awesome.”

That scene, which she was immersed in for almost two decades, helped make Karen into who she is now: an icon of the future with a knack for playfulness, quick wit and kicking ass. For the uninitiated, she burst onto the scene in 2023 with the viral hit Sick Ride, a sassy punk tale of a girl stealing her cheating boyfriend’s car and gleefully driving away with her friends in tow. Following it up with excellent debut EP My World last October, she picked up a slew of famous fans – from Fred Durst to Deryck Whibley – while also building a fanbase all of her own.

Karen comes from the Brazilian coastal city of Santos, 45 miles or so from São Paulo, and began playing shows as a teenager. Where she was, the dominant genre was a Californian style of hardcore punk with a sun-bleached surf-punk inflection indebted to the vibes of the beaches that made the area so distinctive. While she’s living almost 6,000 miles away these days, Karen’s still not far from the beach, with the sound of the seagulls screeching outside the window of her home in St Leonards, Hastings.

She might be punk to the core, but Karen’s path in fact started with a movie. The Blues Brothers – the 1980 sort-of musical classic starring Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi – was the ignition point for her interest, and it remains one of her favourites. From there, she went from bashing on a toy keyboard to attempting to learn to play a real one, but didn’t last long having formal lessons.

Every so often, Karen would go back and try to write a song, but what really affirmed that music was her real passion after all was her discovery of rock, watching MTV and absorbing everything they had on heavy rotation from The Offspring to Green Day to Foo Fighters. Her cousin Paolo would point her in the direction of great bands, too.

It was seeing Avril Lavigne play live when she was 13 that was the true lightning-bolt moment for everything Karen is today.

“I was like, ‘Oh shit – that’s what I want to be,’” she grins. “I want to be onstage.”

So that’s exactly what she did. Although there’s an appetite for rock in Brazil, it generally remains outside of the mainstream (“People don’t consume this stuff very much…”). Nonetheless, Karen and her then-band Violet Soda managed to make considerable strides when they released their debut album in 2019. The Distillers’ Brody Dalle followed her on social media. Pop-punk icons Billie Joe Armstrong and Mark Hoppus knew who she was. Their sound could be heard from far outside of Brazil’s borders.

“I was like, ‘Fuck, am I going to be able to break this curse?’” Karen says. It felt twice as significant given that she was in a male-dominated scene, and no Brazilian women within that world had achieved the same global recognition as the singer Pitty, almost two decades earlier.

Then COVID happened, putting hopes for progress on ice – though Violet Soda persevered and went on to release the live album Unplugged in 2021.

“I thought that maybe it was finally happening,” Karen admits. “But from what I’ve seen since then, it almost became frozen. Now I see all these bands trying to break through, but it’s just so fucking hard.”

Nonetheless, the pandemic brought about a change in the winds. Sooner or later, Karen was to move in a different direction – or, more precisely, from one corner of the world to another.

By late 2021, Brazil was in Karen’s rear-view mirror – and for a period, music was too. She relocated to the UK not for opportunity, but for love, after beginning a relationship with Dinosaur Pile-Up vocalist/guitarist Matt Bigland. After securing her visa, the priorities were finding a steady job, settling in, adjusting to the culture shock… and learning the British sense of humour.

“You guys are very sarcastic!” she laughs. “I know you like to pick on each other.”

For a year and a half, she didn’t do anything relating to music. She wasn’t even thinking about it.

That period also opened up space for some thorough self-discovery, which included a spell in therapy. In Brazil, she’d had to shrink herself in order to survive, but her understanding of herself became frayed in the process.

“That break was to actually understand who I was,” Karen explains. “That time was great to learn a lot about myself and to actually see who I am, what my values are, why I’m doing this and who I’m doing it for. Am I doing this for me? Or am I doing this for someone else?”

One of Karen’s most poignant realisations was just how much she’d felt the sting of misogyny over the years.

“As a silly example, my mum was saying that she doesn’t like when I cut my hair very short,” she says. “When you analyse this whole thing, it’s like, ‘Is that because she’s scared of people who think that I have a masculine aesthetic? And if I do have a masculine aesthetic, why is that a problem?’

“All these insecurities come from other people. So all these blocks that I was putting on myself, I decided, ‘No, this is not what I want to show. This is not who I am.’ All the insecurities that I was having at the time I tried to really work through because I knew when I came back, I really wanted to be myself.”

At one point, Karen considered not returning to her biggest passion altogether, focusing instead on her day job as a graphic designer. In some ways, she was doing okay without music, and was enjoying taking the space to appreciate her new way of living.

“It was so good to finally have a life, basically,” she says. “I was in a place where I could afford to have things that I never had before, like having the latest phone. I was able to live a life and have weekends and not stress about all this stuff.”

It was Matt who coaxed his partner back into songwriting.

“He would come to me and say, ‘You need to be writing music,’” she admits. “He was freaking out, and he was like, ‘You’re in the right place – you should release something.’”

So she did, but she went slowly. After knuckling down to write her first songs as a solo artist, Karen waited a whole year following the release of her feisty debut single Sick Ride to play her first show.

“I was like, ‘There’s no reason for me to put myself on the road when I don’t even know if anyone’s gonna come, ” she explains. “I can’t risk putting that time and effort into something if I don’t know if it’s going to be a waste.”

Before too long, she’d come to see that all that time – plus almost two decades of graft – would amount to something incredible.

Imagine telling your younger self you got to speak to Fred Durst. That’s the position Karen found herself in before too long, part of a stack of awe-inspiring accomplishments for an artist with just one EP to her name. Those songs had only been in other people’s ears for a week when she was opening for Sum 41 at the Canadian pop-punk stars’ final UK shows.

Karen’s also had performances at Download, The Great Escape, 2000trees and Burn It Down written in her calendar this summer just gone, as well as a slot opening for New Found Glory. Come November, she’ll be headlining The Underworld in London – a rite of passage that immediately announces that an artist is Going Places. Somehow, amid all of that, she’s grabbing pockets of time in which to write new music.

“It’s been very overwhelming, but at the same time, all this amazing stuff has been happening,” she reflects. “It’s crazy. It can be exhausting, but I’m really trying to be as present as possible. Everything’s uncertain, so I’m trying to live in the moment. It’s a dream come true – and it’s just the beginning, which is even more exciting.”

Step back, then, and it seems like everything has beautifully aligned for Karen Dió. The risk and sacrifice of uprooting her life paid off when it led to the opportunities of her dreams. She’s got years of experience. She’s in a space where she can be her authentic self, free to be fun, silly and defiant, whether she’s writing songs about cutting her hair short as an act of rebellion or kicking dickheads on the street in the nuts. Maybe there’s an element of the universe’s magic, too.

“I really do believe in energy, and I’m channelling all my energy in the right place,” she grins. “I did the right thing at the right time, and things are happening…”

Karen styles herself as a Latin riot grrrl, both a beacon of representation and someone picking up the torch once carried by legions of women in punk hungering for revolution, girl style, now. It’s a mantle she holds with both pride and care.

“I feel a lot of responsibility because I’m in this place,” she concludes. “I feel very proud to be Latin American, to specifically be Brazilian, and to be able to share this a little bit of Brazilian punk music to the whole world.”

Karen Dió headlines The Underworld in London on November 25. This interview originally appeared in the autumn 2025 issue of the magazine.

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