In an alternate universe, Nazar’s 2020 debut album Guerilla could have been one of the electronic music success stories of the decade. Alas, it was released on March 13, two days after the World Health Organization proclaimed COVID-19 a global pandemic and lockdowns cascaded around the world. This was not a great time for dance music, even dance music as unusual as Guerilla, which was inspired by Nazar’s father’s role in the Angolan Civil War and laced with iPhone recordings made on road trips across the Southern African country. Guerilla was what Nazar called “rough kuduro,” taking the unsteady gait of Angola’s greatest musical export and spiking it with adrenaline, sweat, fear, and the nocturnal unease of fellow Hyperdub producer Burial. Then he all but disappeared.
Nazar has a remarkable backstory. His father was a general and diplomat for the UNITA rebels (and now second biggest political party) who fought, assisted by the U.S., against the ruling MPLA. Guerilla was based on Nazar’s father’s memoirs, its album cover taken from a film circulated by the MPLA to humiliate UNITA. The war drove Nazar and his mother into exile in Belgium, where Nazar worked to piece his father’s life together from afar before returning to Luanda, a personal journey that culminated in Guerilla. Making that album, and criss-crossing the war-torn country, was a physical and spiritual ordeal. Nazar contracted tuberculosis, which flared up after a bout with COVID, upending and almost taking his life. If Guerilla was a document of a civil war, its follow-up, Demilitarize, is the record of Nazar’s own internal struggle after making it.
Instead of the rugged landscape of Angola, Demilitarize surveys Nazar’s mind. It’s brighter and more spacious than Guerilla, an inversion of that album’s olive camo-toned world. Here, the kuduro is a little less rough, almost woozy, more like Nazar’s version of a bedroom pop record: close, whispery, introspective. The music comes in fits and starts, like listening to a half-conscious sleepyhead try to recall their dreams—it’s easy to imagine Nazar, stricken for an entire year by disease, stuck in bed and coming up with new rhythms in his head. “I let my drums pass the message,” he mutters on “Mantra,” as if the extent of his communication is now limited to music.
Nazar’s central presence is the most striking change on Demilitarize. His own voice is everywhere—singing, mumbling, and talking to himself, telling a story or stuck looping in a fever dream. He sounds like a warbly James Blake on opener “Anticipate,” wheezy and almost off-putting, uncomfortable footing steadied by the organ-led R&B lilt of “Core.” The rhythms on Demilitarize are by turns irregular and majestic, made all the more stunning by their rawness: The ticking trap hi-hats on “Unlearn” feel like they were haphazardly soldered to keep the whole thing together, lending a kind of raw, DIY beauty. The colors are bright and the synths are like a cool breeze—but it’s the kind of cold that can suddenly turn bitter, as on “Heal,” a mood-swingy track about being stuck in bed that compresses a mental-health episode into five riveting minutes.
The lyrics are hard to make out, but they’re powerful even in fleeting turns of phrase. “War Game” is a wordy tale of infection and treatment, using the language of war for the body: “10 pills for 6 months as artillery/Neutralise who I be/What’s saving is what’s killing me,” Nazar mutters, while on “Open,” he sings of trenches and blowing up bridges. He compares his illness with his family’s collective trauma over a zippy, barely there beat, with inaudible sub-bass that quakes the soundscape like PTSD flashbacks of far-off shelling. He settles on the lovely phrase, “being open just feels nice,” as the music behind him morphs and twists, like the way 40 used to flip the beat inside out on old Drake guest verses.
The production is astounding, from the heavy percussion offset by iridescent swells of synth on “War Game” to voices smudged like watercolor paints in the background of “Heal.” Demilitarize weaves its dreamworld from gossamer and taffeta, then comes down on it all with 20-ton drums that somehow don’t disturb the peace. The cliched warlike percussion samples of guns cocking and shells falling to the ground sound more like a soldier laying down his arms than preparing for battle. It’s nimble music wearing body armor, making impossible moves.
Demilitarize has something of a happy ending, but it also scans as resolve to keep the fight going. “As I face the void/I reload my ghost,” he sings; “I reset the tone.” This reset brings Nazar closer to kuduro’s party-starting origins than the falling-shrapnel thud of Guerilla—but kuduro’s history is intertwined with conflict, even used as a tool of soft power and electioneering by the MPLA. Nazar’s new position feels closer to the wounded romance and turbulence of the Príncipe crew, expats far away from their ancestral home who also make mutant strains of kuduro and related sounds. There’s a longing in all of this music, a sense of history that’s both felt and lived. Alternately atmospheric and gut-punching, Demilitarize embodies these contradictions for a record even more searing—but also touching—than its civil war-inspired predecessor.
