Nazar

Nazar is 26 years old. In that time, he’s survived civil war – in which his father was a Rebel General – in his native Angola and lived as a refugee in Belgium, before eventually settling in the UK. With an upbringing and young adulthood like that, inventing and self-defining a new genre of music sounds like a piece of piss. That’s what he decided to do with his debut album, Guerrilla. From his home in Manchester, Nazar has created an astonishing, utterly distinctive record that does indeed occupy a very singular artistic space. Whether it represents a truly new style of music is perhaps up for debate, but it’s certainly true that this stuff – for which he has coined the term “rough kuduro” – sounds like little else.