SD9 is acutely aware of the fantasies projected on his hometown. For outsiders, the city conjures images of golden beaches and chilled caipirinhas, maybe the gentle hum of a João Gilberto tune echoing in the distance. To accompany the release of his debut album 40°.40, the Bonsucesso-raised artist wrote a poem about this romanticized vision of Rio, alongside a short visual. In the clip, he renders a fantasy of the city in rich detail, celebrating its gorgeous women and sunny boulevards. He quotes Gilberto Gil’s 1969 song “Aquele Abraço,” in which the Tropicália icon ensures that “Rio de Janeiro is still beautiful.”
And then, within 30 seconds, SD9 shatters the utopia. Scenes of young kids carrying submachine guns flash across the screen as he reveals a more fatalistic picture of Rio—one plagued with police surveillance and brutality, burning cars, and infinite cycles of drug addiction and violence. “Sorry Gilberto Gil, but for me, Rio de Janeiro was never beautiful,” SD9 says. Across the album, he explores a wide range of emotional textures that are part of living in Rio—its pleasures and its hardships. 40°.40 captures a side of the city most people refuse to see.
SD9 and his producers excel when they reimagine their Rio roots within the framework of UK grime. Standout “Poze do Rodo,” featuring fellow Brazilian grime upstarts D r o p e and LEALL, layers an aluminum tamborzão beat over a frosty eskibeat click, a brilliantly metallic synthesis that evokes classic Wiley instrumentals and baile funk parties in equal measure. SD9 and his co-conspirators trade bars about garnering status and respect in the slums while alluding to MC Poze, a funk carioca MC who is regularly targeted by law enforcement for his alleged connections to drug trafficking. Similarly, SD9 drops vocalized tamborzão patterns on songs like “Consequencias” and “B.O.,” using funk carioca’s playful “bum-cha-cha, cha cha” to punctuate his tales of crime and street life.
The centerpiece of these stories is SD9’s guttural timbre, which lends itself well to the curvatures of Portuguese. The macabre church choir stabs on “ODP & Sangue” are coarse enough to get under your skin, and SD9’s staccato, horror-movie flow cloaks the typewriter-like snare drums in a villainous shroud. On the title track, SD9 shares memories of friends gone too soon, lost to police or gang violence. For those who reside in the neighborhoods in the North Zone, past Rio’s famous Christ the Redeemer statue, death is omnipresent. SD9 isn’t afraid to confront this haunting reality in his flow, to make you feel the specter of death in your chest.
His vocals hit the hardest when fortified by the beats of his producers, many of whom are faithful students of grime and its hybrid influences. On the wonderfully ballistic “Astra 1.8,” another meditation on death, beatmaker Chediak combines the overblown bass of 8-bar, the revving of an engine, and jittery jungle breaks; the result feels like two grade-school kids smashing action figures together. DIIGO’s instrumental on “Oi” threads together a breathy sex moan, the blaring horn of a WhatsApp push notification, and 2-step garage textures into a song about a girl at the club with a Ganesha tattoo and Nike VaporMaxes. Meanwhile, frigid piano flourishes appear on the title track and the aforementioned “Poze do Rodo.” These productions are as reverent of grime as they are prescient, illustrating the genre’s capacity for reinvention.
40°.40 traces a blueprint of how to evolve a genre steeped in the history of local communities. It transcends mere tribute and instead functions as an initiation into the underworld of Brazilian grime. It’s no wonder that SD9 and his fellow MCs in the local grime collective TBC Mob selected this genre as their weapon of choice; government officials have racially profiled and criminalized practitioners of funk carioca, Rio’s claim to global music fame, as much as the UK-bred artists from which SD9 draws inspiration. 40°.40 excels when the MC draws sonic and cultural parallels between these sounds. And at the same time that 40°.40 communicates a strong sense of place, it asks us to make sense of the way hyperlocal music movements evolve in the context of globalization. When a genre like grime goes mainstream, traveling across social media networks and streaming platforms, what happens to its context? More than reinscribing stale tropes about music’s capacity to transcend borders and languages, 40°.40 is a testament to the fact that music born out of struggle can transform itself, appealing to people living in similar situations elsewhere—especially those who need it for survival.
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