Nazar

Nazar’s second album, Demilitarize follows his remarkable 2020 debut Guerrilla, which was released just as Covid started to lock down the world. That first album reprocessed kuduro music from Angola with rough textures, field recordings and media clips, re-telling Nazar's personal story of the civil war that exiled his family in Europe, while his father, a rebel General, fought a losing battle in the jungle back home. After Guerrilla, and in the early throes of a new and important romance, Nazar was hit by Covid and with a weakened immune system, the latent tuberculosis he'd incubated while living in Angola, took over his body and left him seriously ill for a year. Reckoning with mortality and the flowering of new love are the two things that motivated this album, turning the ‘rough kuduro’ of Guerrilla inside out. Like his debut, this is a deep sound world, but in contrast to its grit and realness, Demilitarize is genuinely dreamy. The arc of the album describes shedding the armour of trauma and surrendering to this new situation. A constant and unexpected aspect of Demilitarize is Nazar's gentle, submerged vocal. Insistent and mantra-like, it’s like a cross between Elisabeth Frazer, Arthur Russell and Frank Ocean, and the music is fragile and opaque in response.