Blacksea Nao Maya Despertar

Príncipe bless 2025 with a new drop from Lisbon dynamo DJ Kolt’s Blacksea Não Maya unit, sloshing prime subs and wickedly wigged-out synths around body-shaped polyrhythms. It's a proper standout for fans of Príncipe’s inspirational, odder integers, sounding something like DJ Lycox, Moin and Young Echo on a jolly. Yep.

On the spurs of his killer solo slab ‘Verdadeiro’ (p050, 2024), DJ Kolt’s watermark of dare-to-differ ingenuity plays to the weirder thrills of dance music. He brilliantly challenges and toys with expectations, rather than play to the putative common denominators which have set the bar low when compared with club music’s adventurous past, as experienced in the flesh as opposed to mediated via paid-for IG squares.

One for the freaks and those who trust their dancefloor instincts, ‘Despertar’ shells nine super loosey goosey grooves in tight timeframes, each defined by a bias toward proper, bottom heavy weight and wiggle, but cutting wilder in the upper registers with colourfully discordant and cosmically harmonised synths, even leaning into a sort of modern blooz-rocky and acidic psychy vibrancy. In key with Príncipe’s broad artistic license, he does not patronise the ‘floor, giving it what it needs, rather than just what it wants.

A singular unquantised ballast guides the badness from curdled tarraxho in ‘Reborda’ to autotuned blooz in ‘Theca’, via the heady motion of squashed subs and squeezed organ on ‘Tolobasco’, to unexpected hard metal-lic riffage in the bendy-legged dubstep-esque verve of ‘Unseicambo’. Kolt's most surprising sidestep arrives with 'balebale', a grungy masterstroke that replaces electronic snaps and synths with tense live drums, distorted guitars, autoTune-d ad-libs and moody pads on a sort of angular mid-point between Moin and Lil Uzi Vert, while ‘Kirraxo’, recalls Paul Marmota’s gothic dembow and ‘Prala’ simply goes hard on a mutant jack.

Even by Príncipe's standards, it’s way up there.