Mabanzo

This bubbly singer jokes that she grew up ‘pretty much everywhere,’ and there are certainly a lot of influences present in her first album. Family roots that lie in the Democratic Republic of Congo inform the sassy, very catchy single ‘Na Lingi Mobali Te’, with its lovely joyful, ringing guitar courtesy of Mabanzo’s producer, Greg Sanders; and the relentless ‘Camarades’, which constantly threatens to burst into one of those elongated, hypnotic workouts synonymous with her illustrious uncle Franco’s TPOK Jazz.

A childhood spent in Bueños Aires resonates in some of the more Afro-Cuban-tinged numbers like ‘Sueños de Libertad’, ‘Baño de Oro’ and ‘Alma Seca’ (particularly the bonus acoustic version), a song that was featured in Killing Eve and became the album’s catalyst. Once London became her base, she hooked up with the likes of Eliane Correa’s Wara outfit and the London Afrobeat Collective, and there are heterogeneous metropolitan influences at play in numbers such as ‘Mboka Moko’, ‘War is Over’ and ‘For All it’s Worth’, seemingly a sophisticated take on fin de siècle nu-soul. Mabanzo translates as ‘Thoughts’ and Juanita Euka’s highly promising and engaging debut offers us a raft of her experiences as a black woman.