Batuk Freak

A mixture of canny production, assured rapping and tough- to-extricate earworms make this debut album from Brazilian rapper Karol Conka a much-hyped item in this Brazil-obsessed World Cup year. Though much is being made of the fact that Conka’s a female artist in a male-dominated hip-hop world, it’s the forcefulness of her delivery and her ability to spin a memorable phrase that justify the hype. That, and the production by hip-hop wizard Nave, which eschews all clichés by sampling unlikely sources such as pifano flutes and aged emboladas from the north-east of Brazil, adding them to beats that skip all the way from trap to baile funk and back again. On tracks like ‘Gueto’ with its stuttering gunfire rhythm it’s hard not to make comparisons with M.I.A. This is hip-hop that has one foot in the dance tent, with all the crossover potential that entails.

While the album struggles to maintain its pace and ideas over the course of 12 tracks, there are enough fine moments here - especially the single ‘Boa Noite’ - to suggest we’ll be hearing a lot more from Karol Conka in the future.