Songfacts®:

• Brazil hosted the World Cup in 2014, which shed light on the social and economic inequality in the country. In this song, McKenna sings about a man with "Six cars and a grizzly bear," describing a member of the oligarchy. The lyric continues:
  
  He's got eyes but he can't see
  Well he talks like an angel but he looks like me
  
  "I guess this sort of sticks to the playfulness of the song," McKenna said in a video. It's almost cartoony, the way I sort of set the scene with those lyrics. It's kind of exaggerative of the whole grizzly bear thing.
• Regarding the line, "He talks like an angel but he looks like me," McKenna said: "I was talking about the sort of extravagant leader of the corporation, i.e. Sepp Blatter. Maybe doing certain bad things in a way that they would think that they're supernatural or like an angel but actually just being the same as everyone else in kind of being a horrible person."
  
  Swiss sports administrator Sepp Blatter was elected President of FIFA, the organization that controls international football on June 8, 1998. He served as president until 2015, but his reign was increasingly dogged by claims of corruption and financial mismanagement. The controversies came to a head when on September 25, 2015, Swiss investigators announced that they were investigating Blatter in relation to the sale of World Cup TV rights to Caribbean Football Union president Jack Warner at the fraction of their value plus payments made to UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) president Michel Platini. Three months later, the independent FIFA Ethics Committee ejected Blatter from office and banned him from taking part in any FIFA activities over the following eight years (later reduced to six).
• This was the first single for McKenna, who was just 16 when it was released. He came into the public eye after winning the Emerging Talent Competition at the 2015 Glastonbury Festival.
• The song went viral on TikTok in May 2022, sending "Brazil" into the UK singles chart for the first time.
• Declan McKenna originally wrote "Brazil" as part of his college GCSE music coursework. "It got 98%. What was 2% wrong?" he quipped to the BBC. "But I never got it remarked in case they realized it was too generic."