Recife • 19

While it might not be erupting in the manner of Barcelona or Hong Kong, the north-eastern Brazilian metropolis of Recife isn't a hopeful place to be in 2019. At least according to its veteran narrator, DJ Dolores, who paints the hot, gritty streets of his adopted city as being enveloped in ‘a thick cloud of uncertainty,’ richly illustrated on this album's sleeve by a giant mutant Buddha and Big Brother eye monitoring a motley populace in apocalyptic part mode. And who better to channel such a dystopia than this pioneer of electro-trad-futurism, who, decades into his career, may just have created his magnum opus?

Opener ‘A Casta’ sets a familiar tone: elephantine brass lines, churning Afrobeat and incongruous disco pulses, torn by sawing rabeca (fiddle) and in-your-face female commentary and sampled exhortations. As ever, Dolores is a furiously prolific collaborator, pulling in myriad singers, rappers and musicians, not least Henrique Albino, whose wandering, ominously seductive sax makes ‘Teniente Ray, Amargura’ a bitter highlight and whose pífano (fife) lends a brilliantly haunted primitivism to closer ‘Quase Nos Esquecemos’ – the sound of ADHD-afflicted urbanism melting back into the jungle. Deco Trombone's Balkan-esque honking meanwhile is a relative constant, liquefying in a firestorm of white noise on the climax of ‘Adilia's Place’. Recife's own Catarina Dee Jah ignites the wildly percussive ‘Exú Ciborgue’, while the delicious, dreamy vocals and serpentine guitar of Ylanda and Yuri Queiroga on ‘O Gringo’ pierce the Brazilian north east's essentially Afro-Caribbean heart and offer some kind of redemption amid the bedlam.