Soma

As a founder of festival-conquering band Buraka Som Sistema, and producer for leftfield international stars MIA and Princess Nokia, producer João Barbosa aka Branko has done more than most to bring Afro-Portuguese songs to the world. His solo albums since 2016 tended to be less rowdy than BSM, but are no less full of dance energy, and are still faithful to the kuduro, zouk, batida and other modernist fusions formed between Southern Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean and Portugal. This 2024 album, over 20 years from the foundation of BSM, is velvet smooth in its production but is full of bubbling sense of that interplay between cultures still being very much live – and frequently weaving a house pulse into the groove, is a glorious antidote to identikit “Afro-house” which was increasingly clogging the dance scene at the time.