Helviofox Rodeado de Batida

Lisbon’s prodigious club incubator introduce stripling newcomer Helviofox with a battery of piquant batida, downtempo kuduro and dubwise experimentation snatched from drill, Afrobeats and Afrohouse, and defined by fruity leads and a rugged offbeat hoof. In other words - deadly and deep madness to file somewhere between Carl Craig, Nidia and Lechuga Zafiro.

Helviofox is the little brother of seasoned Angolan-Portuguese producers Dadifox and Erycox and he learned how to make beats before most of us had finished figuring out how to spell Autechre. Helviofox is 19 now and got his start when he was just 13, establishing the production crew TLS Produções - with E8Prod, DiionyG, Alberfox and others - only two years later. He’s a producer who’s figured out the shared DNA between garage, Afrohouse and kuduro with whipsmart edits of Jorja Smith's 'On My Mind’, Tems' 'Found’, and most recently turned Clara La San's almost beatless 'Unplanned' into a sensual, helium-gassed R&Batida floor filler - expressing a mix of rudeness and romance that’s key to Príncipe’s broad, durable appeal beyond its Lisbon hotbed.

The six tracks of his ‘Rodeado de Batida’ adapt influential cues from brothers Dadifox and Erycox into a captivating emotive declension of feels and energies, steadily loosening up and slowing down from a killer opener ‘Capucho do Xaboy’, going like a Chicago percolator rubbed with Theo Parrish’s special bass oils, to the exquisitely balmy tarraxho of ‘She WantMeYou’ where you can practically taste Atlantic brine on the air and skin-on-skin in the dance.

Depending on what end of the night you’re coming at, there’s hypnotic, stepping pressure leavened with whistling Martian melody in ‘Alien on Carcavelos Beach’, and sping-heeled bounce on a ‘Rolote da Ice Spice’ brimming with sticky hooks, but he also knows how to simmer it with elegant maturity in the wistful keys of ‘Com as Tropa’, and take it right down to Black Atlantic, almost Drexciyan depths on ‘Sonho Lúcido’, making ace use of an iPhone alarm motif and shoreside atmospheres.