Scroll far back enough on d.silvestre’s SoundCloud and you can still hear his first tracks: a handful of shoddily multitracked Alex G-esque lo-fi guitar demos from 2018. It wasn’t until he stumbled upon DJ Magrones’ “AUTOMOTIVO CADE AS INFLUENCER” that d.silvestre fell in love with Brazilian funk. Since his first funk releases in 2022, the Rondônia-born producer, a.k.a. Douglas Silvestre, has steadily developed his own signatures, DJed for thousands alongside major contemporaries in the São Paulo funk scene, and become heralded in English-language press as a leading experimentalist in funk and mandelão.
A recent and extreme subgenre of Brazilian funk, mandelão originates from the Baile do Mandela party in the Praia Grande area of São Paulo. Funk artists like MC Bin Laden spent the 2010s working distorted productions and brasher vocals into the Miami bass–inspired sound pioneered by aughts funk producers like DJ Marlboro and rappers like Tati Quebra Barraco. Mandelão’s reliance on minimalist, aggressive low ends and harsh monophonic leads definitively severed the sound from its lineage. Whereas Northern artists have frequently borrowed ideas from Brazilian funk—see, for instance, M.I.A. and Diplo’s often voyeuristic interpretations on records like “Bucky Done Gun” and Piracy Funds Terrorism—funk and mandelão have remained fairly insulated from outside influence, given mandelão’s reliance on louder, more repetitive, and more extreme elements. O Que as Mulheres Querem marks a notable horizontal expansion for mandelão and funk in general, incorporating a wider array of traditional club influences beneath d.silvestre’s trademark rumble and screech.
d.silvestre’s early records were focused on developing his own take on mandelão. He first achieved a truly distinct sound with tracks like “OAKLEY OAKLEY OAKLEY” and the seven-minute megamix “Set Estragado 1.0.” The violent distortion and nagging repetition could feel juvenile at times, but the weaponized excess was nonetheless electrifying. O Que as Mulheres Querem maintains many of the qualities of D.SILVESTRE and O Inimigo Agora É Outro, Vol. 2, allowing extreme bass hits, vocal chops, or squealing leads to overwhelm within specific moments or frequencies, rather than dialing the entire sonic range to 11. On O Que as Mulheres Querem, hints of Rustie, PC Music, and big-room tech-house pepper space on top of the grueling bass assault. “Sem Moralismo” struts like a Disclosure track, though that duo could only dream of coming up with sounds this anarchic. “ELA TRAVA” revolves around a contracting bassline that could be a PC Music club tool. A bulk of the tracks feature co-production from funk veteran LUCAS KID, whose style shares more common ground with North American club experimentalists like Nick León and umru than mandelão chieftans like DJ K or d.silvestre himself.
Funk’s team-sport character is apparent not only from d.silvestre’s tracklists but also the crowded DJ lineups he typically appears on. O Que as Mulheres Querem marks d.silvestre’s first release under the Submundo 808 label and party series, where he regularly performs for thousands alongside popular contemporaries like DJ RaMeMes, Kenan e Kel, and Caio Prince. Like his previous records, O Que as Mulheres Querem is littered with guest MCs and producers from the local funk scene, including 17-year-old MC LELE 011, who the producer has called his favorite guest MC, but there’s not much to distinguish the different vocalists; virtually all the rappers deliver their lines with a bratty tone and uncomplicated cadence. d.silvestre fries, chops, and splatters their bars and hooks across his tracks as though they were just more playthings in his digital toy chest. The lone track with no vocalist, “OQAMQ,” is the record’s shortest and weakest, bringing little complexity to its stripped-down drum-machine loop.
Though some of d.silvestre’s incorporations of Northern club sounds can feel clunky, jarring elements don’t typically stick around for long enough to remain in memory; the tech-house hats on “Olha o Tamanho Dessa Onda” last mere seconds before a distorted acid bass commands the rest of the track. d.silvestre’s commitment to mandelão fundamentals makes it unlikely O Que as Mulheres Querem will be taken as an olive branch by hesitant foreign audiences—but then again, the very idea of compromise seems alien to the doggedly hermetic scene. d.silvestre recently told the sample-pack platform Splice that as he pushes his sound to become “the maximum of d.silvestre’s sound, it ends up becoming universal,” potentially resonating with listeners of any nationality. In that sense, O Que as Mulheres Querem’s overtures to global club styles feel less like an attempt to cross over than to draw international listeners into his own unrelenting world.
