This is my fifteenth year in a row making a list of my favorite songs of the year. I started it in 2010 at a hundred songs, and reduced it to fifty in 2020, not because there was less good music but because I couldn’t be as bothered to put in the work to find it all.

Well, for whatever reason, I put in the work in 2025. If you’re coming across this post at a later time from some location that didn’t make it obvious, this is the thirty-first post after an entire month spent discussing music from thirty different regions, genres, countries, demographics, or notional scenes: go back and read all those posts in order to get context for this list below. Or don’t. I’m not your boss.

Even after all that, though, this list doesn’t necessarily look all that different from what it would have been if I hadn’t spent so much time looking more closely. A lot of my old favorites are here, in roughly their usual positions. There are perhaps slightly more new-to-me artists than usual, but not by a lot; I’ve always been taking in some new artists. But I feel like I have a cleaner conscience about it this time around. I haven’t just picked at random; I made more informed choices, and don’t feel as guilty about leaving some worthy songs off, because hey, I talked about them elsewhere.

But I should be clear that even despite my much expanded listening and writing in 2025, I have not even scratched the surface of any of the varied scenes I imagine myself as “covering.” There were 1280 songs on my longlist for the year, which is something like 0.001% of all the music that I could theoretically if not practically have listened to for this list, and that’s before you even start getting into genres or regions outside my typical scope.

And I’m not just talking zero-play no-hopers filling up the long tail: I haven’t listened to most of the big hits, in any category, from anywhere. My reliance on abstruse, unknowable, and ultimately quite random algorithms for discovery rather than the collective wisdom of charts and aggregation or the curatorial intelligence of critics and DJs leaves me tantalized by possibility but rarely actually informed as to context, gorged on music but starving for knowledge, missing the obvious and inescapable forest for the wildly profuse and entertainingly-shaped trees.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

As ever, I’ve collected this list of fifty songs on various streaming services. For once, they are all (as of this posting) there. Pay people or perform piracy if you prefer permanence.

Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal // YouTube Music

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

50 Songs, 2025

50. La Perversa x Puyalo Pantera, “Putica HouseBow”
(Prod. Puyalo Pantera) • Dominican Republic

At this point I’m not sure whether the early rivalry between Dominican dembow princesses La Perversa and Yailin La Más Viral was real or if I made it up in my head based on some YouTube comments and Instagram posts from 2020, but it does still kind of feel karmic to put la Perver on this list afer having loved “Bing Bong” last year. (They also both appeared in my 2025 runners-up, in scrupulous fairness.) The original version of “Putica” produced by El Baby R dropped in December 2024, and was a sizeable hit; this afro-trophouse revamp by sonic wizard Puyalo Pantera was released three months later (with a video on a houseboat, thus the punning title addition), and his aching melodicism, open spaces, and reducing Denisse’s voice down to just another rhythmic element in his giddily expansive stew kept striking me as oddly beautiful and transcendant, even though what she’s rapping about is characteristically earthy.

49. Utah Nice, “Time”
(Prod. Quba) • Rwanda

In the runners-up, this would have slotted under East Africa — Utah Nice, new to me as of 2025, although she’s been active since 2023, is from Kigali, and the production is a very 2020s blend of Tanzanian bongo flava and South African amapiano. But her coolness, both vocally and (in the video) visually, raises the song far above the average level of East African pop, which is itself fairly high. “Give me your time,” she intones, neither begging for attention nor demanding anything more, and that sense of invulnerable self-assurance makes me want to spend more and more time digitally spinning this record.

48. Esmey ft. Ayanne, “Chocoto”
(Prod. Mr Behi) • Ivory Coast

If you check my previous year-end lists you’ll see I’ve been on board with Ivorian pop singer Ayanne for years (and she’s already made an appearance in my 2025 runner-ups), but Esmey, whose career got started several years later (and whose listenership is about 10% of Ayanne’s), first came to my attention via this collab. It’s a naggingly rhythmic dancehall banger, although in a very Ivorian idiom, with g-funk style whining synths and mouth clicks as part of the rhythmic bed. I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what it’s about, other than the badassery and masterfulness of its participants, but the YouTube commenters talking about “Ayanne is our Rihanna” aren’t far off — projecting cool is the primary skillset of the modern pop star.

47. Sarodj, “Le Coeur”
(Prod. Jay Elite) • Dominican Republic (Haiti)

At some point I’m going to have to go back through the Pet Shop Boys’ discography in order to find the ah-ah-ah-ah-ahs that Sarodj’s chorus here is reminding me of, but although that was what first stuck out to me about this song, the airy afrobeats rhythm and Sarodj playing sweetly coy in French and English rather than crudely forthright (honorific) in Spanish or Kréyol about sexual desire was enough of a change of pace from her — and from the Hispaniola-straddling dembow scene in which she usually operates — that I ended up falling in love with the song as a whole. Yes, even the cheap lyrics visualizer featuring her rolling around in a bed making eyes at the camera. Her runner-up appearance was bouncier dembow, but intimacy is attractive.

46. Kazzabe, Las Catrachas & Lachi the Real Melody, “Caliente”
(Prod. Genio, Big Kev) • Honduras/USA (Cuba)

For more background on girl group Las Catrachas, see their entry in my Central American runners-up. This collaboration with legendary Honduran punta band Kazzabe, who have been going since the mid-1990s, and Cuban-American urbano singer Lachi TRM, who has found a niche for himself within the Honduran raspe scene, is almost overwhelming in its hyper-percussive rush (only Senegalese mbalax and Tanzanian singeli compare), but the main thrust of the song — the sun is hot, so get out and dance — is universal. It was also nice to see [stalks Instagram] Gislym Rochez get some lead vocals before she left Las Catrachas.

45. Amaarae, “Girlie-Pop!”
(Prod. Kyu Steed, Maffalda, Deekapz, Mackson Kennedy) • USA (Ghana)

2025 was the year Amaarae, who I’ve been championing (if in a head-down, inobservant way) since 2018, broke into the indie mainstream, if the chatter about her on my quiet, frequently backward-looking Bluesky timeline is anything to go by. The higher-energy, more blatant “S.M.O.” was the people’s pop pick (literally), but the softer, sweeter, gayer “Girlie-Pop!” ended up being my Ammaraearworm of the year. With everything from gun-cock samples to old-school hip-hop scratching to wailing electric guitars the funk batida buried in the mix, it’s not beating the hyperpop allegations, but Amaarae has a knack for finding the middle route between hyperpop and sedatedpop, and using genrefucking as a metaphor for other kinds of fucking is right up my critic’s broken-by-genre-brain alley.

44. Letón Pé & Bodine, “Bunda”
(Prod. Blvck95, Xay) • Dominican Republic/Puerto Rico

Of course I would be enchanted by a song in which Caribeña alt-pop divas embrace Brazilian flavor, from the title — “bunda” is Brazilian Portuguese slang for ass — to the funk batida that carries the two of them along their merry way. I glanced at Bodine in the Puerto Rico runners-up, but Letón Pé was newish to me; a Dominican-born, NYU-trained performer, she’s seems most comfortable in pop and r&b forms that gesture toward tropical dance music rather than the other way around, but this collaboration got her out of her respectable, “artistic” comfort zone, even though it’s plenty respectably artistic compared to a lot else of what is on this list.

43. Shannon & HollyG, “A Lot of Money”
(Prod. Unicktak Beats) • Martinique/Guadeloupe

Although I’ve listed HollyG as the co-performer, this is really a duet between Martinican shatta queen Shannon and Holly, the lead singer of the reigning bouyon trio that is named after her; the other two members (and Holly’s nieces), 6 Tresses and Cheveux Rouge, appear in the video but don’t take a verse. On reflection, I don’t actually know that this song is extremely better than both the Shannon and the HollyG songs I discussed in the runners-up; but what it undisputably has in its favor is getting two of the coolest French Antillean artists going for the price of one. Shannon has to adapt to fast-paced bouyon more than Holly has to slow things down for shatta, but it’s been a bouyon kind of year.

42. Maura Delgado, “Away”
(Prod. Mark G) • USA (Cape Verde)

In my list of Cape Verdean runner-ups, I concentrated on performers who were enmeshed in the Portguese music industry. Maura Delgado, in contrast, is based in Boston, and her richly textured r&b-suffused music is very much a product of the U.S. indie scene, even though she sings in Portuguese and Kriol as well as in English. There’s a hint of kizomba to the beat, but r&b — in an Erykah/Sade mode — is the overriding aesthetic here. And for once those kinds of namechecks aren’t a disservice to the newcomer: Maura’s singing is strong enough to withstand the comparison.

41. Lady Lava, “Bare Bounce”
(Prod. Ruff Kut) • Trinidad & Tobago

And so the downside of pact I made with myself when I decided that music video premieres would be what I counted as the release date for the purposes of these lists comes due. This single was released to streaming services in April 2023; the video taking almost two years to drop on YouTube (March 2025) is no doubt good business sense for Trini dancehall superstar Lady Lava and her team, extending the life of single which hadn’t gotten its due, but it messes with my precious sense of forward momentum, lol. If the disparity matters to you, sub in her bouyon track I praised in the runners-up; but whether it’s Carnival 2023 or Carnival 2025 it’s a monster of an old-school dancehall track, maybe even taking some slight inspiration from bouyon rhythms several years ahead of schedule.

40. Jotabe Banga ft. Jéssica Pitbull, “Salalé Três Três”
(Prod. Tury Bayos) • Angola

Back in October I wrote about catching up on Angolan kuduro provocateur Jéssica Pitbull’s recent work, which I’d been disgracefully neglecting (as with basically all non-Titica kuduro). I covered one of her outrageous 2025 kuduro efforts in the runners-up, but this isn’t kuduro at all: Jotabe Banga is an Angolan musician who is trying to get the Angolan version of reggaeton (as well as other dancehall-based music) to catch on, and at least by the numbers, this collaboration might be the closest he’s come yet. The dembow rhythm doesn’t quite hit here the way it does in the western hemisphere — the doomy synths overlaying everything are much more trappy Afrohouse than they are Caribbean — but if I just take it as an Angolan banger rather than as an entry in the international reggaeton sweepstakes, it goes down real smooth.

39. Emilia, Tini & Nicki Nicole, “Blackout”
(Prod. Zecca) • Argentina

This song, by contrast, only features the dembow rhythm briefly, but it’s much more in conversation with pan-American reggaeton culture. Dubstep, baile funk, and merengue are the key rhythms depending on the section of the song, because it’s 2025 and why should a song ever be just one thing? All three women are headlining Argentine pop-urbano performers; I haven’t noticed any of them publicly before now, but I can’t notice everything, and they’re doing just fine without my attention. The funny, sexy, and inventive video was what first grabbed my eye, but the creative rhythmic switch-ups and the melodic hooks on hooks on hooks (there are ten songwriters credited, and they all put in work) kept it at the top of my longlist all year.

38. Nameless ft. Maandy, “Non Stop”
(Prod. G.L.) • Kenya

I observed last year (in the entry for a Maandy song, no less!) that most of my dancehall picks were not from Jamaica, and that same trend continues this year. A bunch of my East African runners-up were also dancehall tunes (including two Kenyan ones), but none of them were as purely joyous and effervescent as this one. Producer G.L. is introduced in the video description as a newcomer, but his addition of a live brass section (rather than mere samples) elevates this song from bouncy fun to affecting, effective pop. Nameless is a charismatic frontman, Maandy adds a slick, sharp-tongued counterpoint, and Mackinlay Music on trumpets and Peter Kingori on saxophone provide not just ecstatic hype but groove, placing this at the unusual intersection of two classic 1990s genres: dancehall and smooth jazz.

37. Neyna, “Pa Quê?”
(Prod. Sany San) • Cape Verde

Over the past half-decade I’ve come to appreciate Neyna as one of the most reliably creative figures in Cape Verdean pop (I first noticed her in 2021, but in 2022 she produced, on reflection, one of my all-time favorite CV songs). Her entry in my runners-up was one of a string of kizomba duets between striking young women and sullen young men, but this is something entirely different. The YouTube video has it tagged as afrohouse, but there’s no bass stomp: the rhythm is an airy Cape Verdean take on baile funk, and the video shows Neyna enjoying the sights, sounds, sun, and sabores of Rio de Janeiro in the fahionably skimpy attire of the metropolis. It’s still very Cape Verdean — there’s a light wistfulness to her exhortations to travel, party and forget bad lovers that singers from the islands excel in — but when the real funk clave drops toward the end, it’s enough to bring a lump to your throat.

36. Guchi, “Pressure”
(Prod. Enrgii) • Nigeria

A song has to be really good in order to get away with repeating the title of my favorite song of 2024. But once again (see her entry in that same list, plus again) I’m finding Guchi to be #relatable in ways that transcend the vast differences between us in geography, age, culture, race, and presumably politics. I basically feel the same way about Nailah Blackman’s catalog too (shout out “Melancholy”, forever), but although this song can be taken literally as a Just Say No PSA about refusing to partake in drugs or alcohol, the middle eight, with its inclusion of depression among the ills she wants taken from her, stands out, forcing me to reanalyze the song not as anti-peer pressure but as anti the internal pressures impelling her me to self-medication. For some reason I always end up analyzing Guchi lyrics more deeply than any other in these lists; but the stop-start dancehall production, with ghostly instrumental shifts and liquid sub-bass lines swimming through the murk, is just as cool and important.

35. Mimãe ft. Nkosananaizy, “Ngkhala Zome”
(Prod. Fredy Rich) • Mozambique/South Africa

Because I’m looking at music videos rather than discographies when I put together these lists, I didn’t quite realize that both the Mimãe song I included in my runners-up and this one are both from the same EP. If I had realized, I might have deprecated one or the other and bumped up something else from the longlist in the interest of greater diversity of sources — but on the other hand my truth is my truth, and my truth is that Mimãe’s mozapiano absolutely rocks. “Ngkhala Zome,” according to machine translation, means something like “I weep greatly” in either Xhosa or Zulu (so, uh, jot that down), and although you can certainly feel the sorrow in the gentle throb of the music, you can’t help feeling the joy too: South African house is just too powerful.

34. Ebony, “Extraordinária”
(Prod. Pep Starling) • Brazil

Those keeping careful track may be surprised here: wasn’t Ebony in my Afro-French runners-up? That’s Ebony Cham, born in Paris, whose pop career only dates from 2025; this is Milena Pinto de Oliveira, born in Rio de Janeiro, who has been active in the Brazilian rap scene under the name Ebony since 2017, when she was seventeen years old, although I only noticed her last year. I may be the only person in the world so specifically invested in such widely disparate scenes that such confusion would even be possible; but regardless, the lordly way in which she approaches this song, a self-celebration in concrete terms as a Black woman in a racist, misogynist society, makes the stately rhythm and deceptively simple flow feel more victorious and regal than dull or repetitive.

33. Strikes & Elisama, “Slow Whine (Remix)”
(Prod. Christopher Birch) • UK (Jamaica/Guyana)/Panama

Because of my dilettantish attention to dancehall, London-born MC Strikes (active from 2018) was new to me, but this riddim from long-serving dancehall producer Chris Birch, with its mariachi and bolero accents, would have grabbed me if I’d heard the original back in 2024. But of course the draw for me was Panamanian reggaetonera Elisama, who I’ve been rooting for since her 2019 debut, on the remix — and of course she opens the song up, providing more texture, variety, and sensuality to what had previously been pretty one-note. The original was his biggest hit to date on Spotify, and thanks to the video, the remix has been his biggest hit on YouTube (as well as being her biggest since 2020). Of course this kind of cross-cultural collaboration would be right up my alley regardless, but the fact that it’s been fairly well-received gets me hoping for more.

32. Cacau Chuu & MC Vuk Vuk, “Kamekamera”
(Prod. DJ Arthur ZL) • Brazil

“Horror phonk” reads one of the top YouTube comments in totality, and that’s not wrong; most of the other comments are pushing up their glasses and “correcting” them about the spelling of Dragon Ball Z’s Kamehameha. (The r in Brazilian Portuguese is pronounced with an aspiration, sounding close to an h.) I am not much of a phonk guy — I’m barely a funk proper guy, as noted yesterday — but this pop culture-brained aural sledgehammer made its way into my rotation and I found it more appealing than 2025 efforts from acclaimed figures like Pipokinha despite my best efforts.

31. Sarafina, “Showtime (Décalé Dokafèle)”
(Prod. DJ Sara) • USA (Ivory Coast)

When I first came across Sarafina the Great back in September, I was so immediately taken with her that I listed this song as one of my 50 favorite songs of the 2020s a month later. Having had a moment to take a step back, it’s still a great blend of coupé-décalé and drill, rapped in Ivorian French and US English, although more work has grown to precede it in my affections since. For the last several months I’ve been concerned that she was doing another disappearing act, but she dropped another single last week. Great! As long as she cares to take me on this ride, I’m strapped in.

30. Isat, “Vibe”
(Prod. Thy Young) • Sierra Leone

I’ve already praised Sierra Leonean singer Isat in my West African runners-up post, but here’s more evidence of her skill at inhabiting laid-back transnational party music. The Cuban son clave, Jamaican dancehall, Nigerian afrobeats, South African amapiano, and North American r&b all fit together here in a song addressing one of the most promiment discursive elements of the 2020s. Rhyming “make the people feel me vibe” with “I just feel like getting high” hardly the most original thought in the world, but that’s the point: vibes discourse isn’t about originality, it’s about recognizing commonalities, shared experiences, aesthetic reflections, and prioritizing keeping the mutual feelings good and groovy over more incisive analysis. Insufficient theory, but good praxis.

29. Tayl G, “Oa”
(Prod. Eypi Vibez) • Guatemala

It’s so lovely to have enjoyed a virality-courting single from a young Black Guatemalan urbano artist four years ago (who you only noticed in the first place because you lived in Guatemala as a teenager, and a single visit to the Caribbean city of Puerto Barrios during a senior trip remains fixed in your memory as one of the happiest times of your life), to have sort of lost track of him in the years since, and then to rediscover him in 2025, love one song enough to call it one of your favorites of the decade, and then realize that actually you like this one even more. The confidence it takes to bookend an afropiano song with bachata is one thing (it might be hubris in a less grounded performer), but to actually put it off, creating one of the smoothest Afro-Latin jams of the year — no matter how little-heard it’s been across the continent — I’d say I fel vindicated, but honestly I wouldn’t have had the vision to believe in him to this degree back in 2021. Guate pa’l mundo, arriba los chapines, ¡sí se puede!

28. Titica ft. Rebo & Kyaku Kyadaff, “Oko Boma Nga”
(Prod. DJ Devitor) • Angola/Congo-Kinshasa

Anyone who has paid any attention to my internet profile for the past fourteen years should already know that I’m a Titica fan (but just in case, here are some times I’ve talked about her in the last six months). Her parents came as refugees to civil war-era Angola from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and she’s relatively frequently embraced those Congolese roots, singing in French and Lingala over soukous and ndombolo rhythms. This summit with the brilliant young Congolese star Rebo, who is twenty years younger but just as much a sui generis weirdo as Titica (but generates less controversy for it, because she’s cis), goes hard, inspiring both women to exceptional verses. Kyaku Kyadaff, from the northern, Lingala-speaking, region of Angola, is just there to croon the choruses (he’s not even in the video) while the women get on with the serious — but frequently funny, because that’s who they are — work of rapping.

27. Maurane Voyer ft. Meryl, “Tinenlanmauryl”
(Prod. DJ Tutuss) • Martinique

I’ve written about Maurane and Meryl in the Martinican runners-up (as well as on Bluesky here and here, respectively), but together they make a whole new synthesis that works just as well as either of them do separately. I’ve been a fan of Meryl for years, but it wasn’t until 2025 that I felt Maurane’s material lived up to her singing. The title of this song isn’t a lyric, but a blending of their two names: Maurane singing saucy taunts in a girlish high register while Meryl delivers bluntly hilarious boasts in gruff masc tones. Tutuss’ spare, booming track puts the emphasis on their performances, which are charismatic enough to have made this my second-favorite shatta song of the year. Although warning: the video is a three-for-one, including Maurane’s “Gamora” and “Faché” ft. Guyanese rapper Lion P, both of which are more emotionally extravagant zouk rather than flinty, squirrelly shatta.

26. MC Soffia & Tasha e Tracie, “Tô de Nave”
(Prod. Vinex) • Brazil

I am of an age and social class where the opening of this song still gets me unreasonably hype, even though it’s more than twenty years old at this point. Of course it’s more than fair game for the synth stabs and Lil Jon growls from “Yeah!” to be repurposed for a trap-funk banger about how young Black women run the Brazilian rap game. I’ve written a bunch about former child rapper MC Soffia before (she’s reliably appeared here every year since 2022), and I noted twins Tasha & Tracie in the runners-up, but this collab is brilliant fun far beyond the obvious sample. “Treze anos de carreira, só duas décadas de vida,” notes Tracie about Soffia (thirteen years of a career, just two decades of living). She and Tasha are almost a decade older, but in industry terms, Soffia is the veteran.

25. Moliy, Shenseea, Skillibeng & Silent Addy, “Shake It to the Max (Fly) (Remix)”
(Prod. Silent Addy, Disco Neil) • USA (Ghana)/Jamaica/USA (Jamaica)

Just did a real quick sort of the YouTube playlist of these 50 songs by popularity, and this song has more plays than just about everything below it put together. (And there are two songs with even more plays than that; they’re both in my top 10.) I don’t imagine that I’m introducing anyone to this record who has been curious enough to find their way to this page and read this far — if a song has won an iHeartRadio Music Award that’s a pretty good indication it’s gotten plenty of exposure — but it’s a good reminder that I do actually like megapopular stuff from within my chosen lanes on occasion, in part because it’s not really any different in quality or kind than the stuff that gets a fraction of the spins but which I love all the more as if to make up for its broader neglect. Silent Addy’s creepin’ creepin’ production, Moliy’s breathily muttered lyrics, Skilli and Shense bringing some actual heat to the proceedings — it was a deserved smash in every iteration that came across my home page, and there were a lot. of them.

24. Daymé Arocena & Apache, “Candela Wena”
(Prod. César Avila, Seba Otero) • Cuba/Venezuela

My contemporary Cuban listening generally circles pretty tightly around reparto, the modern electronic urban music that takes reggaeton and dembow and blends them with merenhouse, Afro-Cuban percussion and dubstep drops to create something new and unruly. Which is why I hadn’t really noticed Daymé Arocena until 2025: she’s a singer in a much more traditional Cuban vein (she’s actually a proper singer, for one thing), with a highly respectable catalog that includes jazz, soul, salsa, and Afro-Cuban roots music. So this pop fillip, with an afrobeats/soukous production and a guest spot from Afro-Venezuelan rapper Apache, could be considered beneath her dignity, or indeed above mine. But it’s a reminder that Afro-Latin music can sound like a lot of things, and that there is in fact more continuum of practice between the Hispanicized afrodiaspora (she reminds me in spots here of Goyo, the great Afro-Colombian hip-hop artist) than my usual focus on commercial urbano forms always catches.

23. Ronisia, “Swipe”
(Prod. JoA, Some1, Joé Dwèt Filé) • France (Cape Verde)

I’ve been noticing Ronisia since 2021 according to the videos that YouTube indicates I’ve played, but my only previous public attention to her was as a “ft.” credit in the Afro-French runner-up earlier this month. I hadn’t even known her family was Cape Verdean in origin (which might have endeared me to her more, I’m such a sucker for the Afro-Luso disapora), although I had often respected and enjoyed her work without ever becoming so attached to it that I felt compelled to share it with others. She’s a solid mid-tier figure in Parisian pop urbaine, with multiple eight-figure play counts on various platforms but rarely more (and usually needing a male voice on the track to even get that far). I don’t know that “Swipe” is objectively better than everything else she’s ever done; I may well just be seduced by the glamorous chiaroscuro of the video, but she sounds cooler and more confident than I ever remember, and fuck I love a cool confident, slightly aloof pop singer. She’s French, the aloofness is baked in.

22. Rebo, “Guitar”
(Prod. Binetou Sylla) • Congo-Kinshasa

The only performer listed in my top fifty twice, because Rebo’s 2025 was just that great. She’s also among my Congolese runners-up — but the fact that this is the first time I’ve noticed her publicly since 2021 (and not even on the main list then!) shouldn’t be taken as evidence that she’s leveled up recently, more that I have just not been paying very close attention (although checking my YouTube history, I have listened to at least one song of hers every year; maybe before the Twenties are out I’ll have the bandwidth to listen through everything and revise my scattershot opinions from earlier in the decade). It takes a certain kind of perverse self-certainty to call a song “Guitar” and then not include the sound of a guitar anywhere on it — maybe especially in the DRC, the home of soukous guitar wizardry. As far as I can tell she’s calling herself a shapely guitar that needs to be played properly, with the right degree of care, knowledge and technique, and the sexy late-night ndombolo beat only drives home her point further.

21. SunDivas, “Sick Wuk”
(Prod. Fryktion) • UK (St. Lucia/St. Vincent/Barbados)

Sisters Sunshine and NaDiva were born in East London but rep their multiple island heritages fiercely. They’ve been active in the UK Carnival scene since 2016, but I first noticed them in 2021 (with a song originally released in 2019, but the video took two years), and misidentified them as Trinidadian, I guess because I assumed everyone making soca came from Trinidad? Jesus. Anyway, this is only their second fully-produced music video; the grind of an independent soca act, especially a female one, is not for the weak. But it’s a hopped-up banger, with visuals shot in St. Vincent, the sisters reciting everything about them that is a problem (complimentary) and showing off their wuk (Bajan for whine). The stripped-down soca beat with doomy minor-key synths goes extremely hard, and if the response to it hasn’t been everything they might have hoped, I’m encouraged to see that their YouTube channel is now more focused on their music than on the lifestyle vlogging it had been for several years before.

20. Kryssy, “Batché a Bo’y”
(Prod. DJ Skunk) • Martinique

It’s pretty ironic that I dedicated a whole day in the runners-up to Dominican dembow, and then in my top fifty am only listing two dembow songs, one of which isn’t even Dominican. Kryssy also got her own entry in the Martinique day with an almost equally fierce bouyon track; but this sharp, short, built-for-virality song is virtually impossible to dislodge from your head once you’ve heard it. She pinned a YouTube comment calling her signature dance move in the video a “tétécoptère” — a move I’ve seen go viral on TikTok several times, in part because despite involving the breasts it ends up catering much less to the male gaze than you would expect; men can’t stand when women they’re trying to lust over are funny on purpose. But never mind all that: when Kryssy coos “do re mi fa sol la tidooooooooo” and the cowbell donks in, there’s nothing better.

19. Theodora, “Fashion Designa”
(Prod. Jeez Suave) • France (Congo-Kinshasa)

Another idiosyncratic video release determining eligibility for this list: “Fashion Designa” was on Theodora’s debut album Bad Boy Lovestory in November 2024. But the effects-heavy video wasn’t released until early June 2025, so I’m counting it here. By the standards of the rest of Theodora’s 2025 releases, it’s relatively sedate; I already noted her (twice!) in the runners-up, and her other new videos, “Mon Bébé” and “Masoko na Mabele”, were if anything more frantic than the 2024 song that made her a star. “Fashion Designa,” by contrast, merely smolders rather than sizzling: but even at lower tempos she’s one of the world’s weirdest, coolest pop stars, taking a spot as the French Grace Jones that most of us didn’t even realize existed, much less was vacant.

18. Wes ft. Urias, “Kawasaki”
(Prod. Carlo, Lastra) • Brazil

I talked in the Brazil runners-up about the importance and centrality of queer (and specifically trans) performers within the Brazilian pop ecosystem, but my favorite trans Brazilian artist, Urias (who I’ve been on board with since 2019’s “Diaba”) only released one video in 2025; her phenomenal album Carranca was released with nothing but static visualisers, a strategic bid for being taken as a serious artist in addition to a pop star. But what a video! The male rapper/singer Wes, who foregrounds his own LGBTQIA+ identity in his media bios, delivers a sharp, intense verse before Urias takes over as the titular Kawasaki motorcycle (“ABSOLUTE CINEMA” scream the YouTube comments), demonstrating why he refers to her as mamãe (mother) on Insta. Industrial collides with hip-hop, and the funk batida snaking its way through the wreckage grabs onto the hips like the Rottweiler that is one of Urias’ many symbols. Get the hell on board.

17. Shaydee's, Maureen & Mikado, “Cvni”
(Prod. Mikado) • Martinique

Another song I named as one of my favorites of the decade before I had a chance to name it as one of my favorites of the year. Shatta queens Shaydee’s and Maureen both appeared in my Martinique runners-up, as did kingmaking producer Mikado (multiple times!), but none of them were as casually, filthily, righteously monarchical elsewhere in 2025 as they were here. And I do mean filthily — this is an ode to cunnilingus in unvarnished French and Antillean Creole, with neither lady satisfied by the efforts of their prospective suitors to date. But then compared to Mikado’s riddim even a jackhammer would fall short in power and intensity.

16. Los Dioses Del Ritmo & Ysa C, “Agüita e Coco”
(Prod. Adman, Kevin Vega Mix) • Colombia

I dedicated an entire day to the Afro-Colombian scene(s) in the runners-up, but of course I didn’t come close to exhausting the candidates. Ysa C has been on my radar since just after I posted my 2024 list, but while I’ve liked her Colombian afrobeats aesthetic, nothing struck me as hard as this collaboration with pioneers of ritmo exótico, the Afro-Colombian youth music of Quibdó (see also Luis Eduardo Acústico). The song, “Coconut Water,” hovers in afrobeats equilibrium along the axis of Ysa’s cool, dispassionate alto before bounding into punchy life as La Meaya and Luigy Boy take over. All of the participants here are very young — the Colombian Pacífico scene is notably younger than any of the others I follow — which makes me eager to hear them mature into the full flower of their capabilities, if they’re already this good.

15. Duda Pimenta, “Ice na Boca”
(Prod. Rico Manzano, Pimolú, Vincee, Quiriku) • Brazil

I said above I wasn’t a phonk guy, but I guess I didn’t really realize that this is, at least in part, a phonk song. (It’s also a desert blues song, a Rosalía song, and for a couple of seconds a tango song.) It’s far more artful, refined, and expensively produced than most phonk, which would probably disqualify it from consideration by listeners who want the crass urgent donk of the new and nothing else, but I’m someone who loves work that lives in the overlaps of Venn diagrams much more than I am someone who cares deeply about the pure, unalloyed edges. I’d only really noticed Duda Pimenta before in her collaborations with MC Soffia — they were both child stars making anti-racist, proto-feminist pop in the 2010s — but this banging, elegant, darkly glamorous song has put her high on my list of figures to keep track of.

14. Tamy Moyo, “Sondela”
(Prod. Wayne Beats) • Zimbabwe

I was startled to realize that I’ve never really featured Tamy Moyo on any of my lists before. (Except once. When I did a blurbless runners-up list in 2018, I misidentified her as Tanzanian.) I’ve been listening to her for years with keen enjoyment, and the fact that she’s always just fallen to last-minute trims in order to keep the list at 50 feels, frankly, disrespectful. At least now she’s got an unimpeachable classic that I can lavish praise on. “Sondela” is “come closer” in Zulu, and this Zimhouse track takes heavy cues from classic kwaito to the south, but very much stands on its own, from the kicking drumline to the watery piano to Tamy’s own glorious house-diva performance, mostly in English save for the repeated, earwormy title. This was an album track on her 2024 long-player Bold, but the February 2025 video release put it on my radar for this. She’s had a whole other album cycle since, videos for which are coming out as I write this, and which I can’t wait to get to once I’m done here.

13. Salle, “Underskirt”
(Prod. Twitchpapi) • Nigeria

I admired Salle’s work in the Nigerian runners-up, but this song from the same EP knocked me out even more. There’s not just a cool but a glacial 1980s quality to the production here, reminding me of everything from Sade to Flock of Seagulls but being, of course, ultimately and only redolent of 2020s Nigeria. Despite (?!) the title, it is not a sexy song, but an ode (even if an equivocal one) to feminine power: the chorus “Wetin you de find underskirt, you go see am and your eye go red” is a curse rather than an allurement, a warning to creeps and misogynists that a woman’s fastness belongs to her alone, and just as it was the source of your life it can be the means of your undoing. Salle was new to me in 2025, but clearly I’ve been missing out: my only comfort, looking at her play stats, is that so have a lot of people.

12. Isemylee, “Laissez Ça”
(Prod. Adams Beat) • Haiti

Not only did Isemylee appear in my Haitian runners-up, so did the producer of this track, twice. Which might indicate a worrying shallowness in the talent pool for Haitian pop — but I, of course, would prefer to attribute it to my own limited range of investigation. To be fair to me, though, it’s a really killer production, much better (although I liked them too) than either of the ones in the runners-up. And Isemylee, who didn’t get to show off too much of a personality in the posse konpa I pointed out there, proves to have a winningly sassy, smoothly confident persona when left to her own devices, switching nimbly between English, French and Kréyol as she tells off some fool of a guy for trying to get with her without investing anything in her portfolio. Is she portraying a gold digger? Sex worker? Pop star? Woman with self-respect? All of the above, and more: the taunting tone is designed to confirm the manosphere’s worst suspicions, but mockery is all those dipshits deserve anyway.

11. J Noa, “Yeh!”
(Prod. La Clave en el Ritmo) • Dominican Republic

I’ve had a lot to say about young Dominican hardcore rap phenom J Noa recently, including in the Dominican (non-dembow) runners-up. Her 2025 was exploratory and varied — if this were the kind of list that included cohesive EPs in addition to single tracks, Los 5Golpe would run away with it — but as if to remind everyone why she’s the DR’s Great Black Rap Hope, and not just another disposable twentysomething for the dembow machine to chew up and spit out, she dropped this monster of a track in October, featuring a classic jungle (as in the UK drum ‘n’ bass variant, not tribal drumming) beat which she more than keeps up with in velocity, intricacy and force. Lyrically it’s a typical call for haters and posers to step off, but her encyclopedic range of reference, rhyme game, and sheer mastery elevates it above any standard diss into immortal art. Goddamn it, she’s got me talking in rockist terms again.

10. DJ Lag & Zee Nxumalo ft. K.C. Driller, “NgyaSindelwa”
(Prod. DJ Lag, K.C. Driller) • South Africa

Okay, this is 3-step. Back in the South African runners-up, I wasn’t sure I could identify it. But I was sure that 2025 belonged to Zee Nxumalo, if it belonged to any female South African singer. (In almost those exact words. Sigh.) But while I liked her poppier efforts with producer Skillz, a proper heavy-duty workout like this (6:25 on DJ Lag’s Southside Mixtape, a multigenerational saga in a list dominated by songs that would rather die before they completed a third minute) convinced me that she could also hold it down as an interlocutor with nobody but drum cuts, bass wobbles and synth washes. The video version trims off two minutes, which still leaves a generous running time, but for once the video doesn’t matter much to me: the majestic rise and fall of the beat, as Zee intones “Ngyasindelwa” (I’m surviving, according to Google Translate), is what compels.

9. Cazzu, “Con Otra”
(Prod. Nico Cotton) • Argentina

Since it’s unlikely I’ll ever do anything else with the 13,000 words (about a quarter of the projected total) I typed for a now-abandoned project of watching the video for every song that was #1 on one of Popnable’s country charts on a random day last September, I might as well copy-paste my reaction to hearing this, in between the entries for Angola and Armenia:

If asked, I’d have said that I’d been familiar with Cazzu’s game since 2018, so although this wasn’t one of the songs I’d already heard, I was pleased to get to check in with her again. But a lot has apparently happened since the last time I did; back in 2021 she was doing inventive postmodern reggaeton and trap, and this is a throwback cumbia in a 1990s/2000s mold (but a specific Argentine mold, not the tejano cumbia of Selena). The gossip around the song, which seems to have been part of the fuel for its overwhelming success, is that it’s a scalding takedown of her ex Christian Nodal and his new wife Ángela Aguilar (both are popular Mexican regional performers, Aguilar in particular belonging to the third generation of a revered Mexican ranchera-music dynasty), but the video features no love triangle or cheating melodrama: it simply follows Cazzu as she puts the song on the radio and sings along with it in the shower, while getting dressed, while on the bus, in line for a concert (where contemporary cumbia singer Rocío Quiroz is her companion), and finally at the lip of the stage, screaming out the lyrics with all the rest of the audience as a mystery performer delivers the final chorus. The closing shot revealing who was performing at the concert brought tears to my eyes even though I didn’t recognize her, that’s how obvious it was that Cazzu and her team were doing everything they could to portray her as a beloved icon: Karina la Princesita, a popular cumbia argentina singer since 2005, and whose love life has also been famously troubled. Cazzu is deliberately placing herself in a lineage of respectable, even traditional tropical-music artists (her 2025 album Latinaje is apparently a whirlwind of genres both old and new, and I’m adding it to my listening queue right now), whether as a riposte to the Nodal–Aguilar ménage or for her own artistic reasons doesn’t really matter; either way it’s fascinating to see some of the most creative members of the late-2010s generation of urbano stars make a deliberate turn towards Latin music history this year, cf. Bad Bunny’s latest flirtations with salsa and plena. The video portraying ecstatic feminine community and cathartic communal release as an antidote to the gray, heartbroken solitude of the first half of the video is also a very 2025 thing to note: whatever the crisis in masculinity is getting up to, the girls will be all right.

I talked about the song again when I included it as one of my favorites of the decade, and about its parent album, which I listened to on a lunchtime walk a couple weeks ago, and couldn’t help mouthing along to this song like Cazzu does in the video, caught between grinning and weeping as the wind blew along the Riverwalk and I tried to time my steps to the cumbia rhythm. This song breaks every one of the rules I set for my typical listening: the fake crowd sounds at the opening and close, the deliberate old-fashionedness of the music, not engaging at all with the sounds of the present, the melodramatic lyrics in a classic romántica mode rather than a modern urbano one — but fuck it. It’s my list, I do what I want, and this is important to me. If modernity requires me to turn my back on middle-aged Latina women, modernity can go to hell.

8. DJ Jesus ft. Ary, “Loka”
(Prod. DJ Jesus) • Angola

(The above image isn’t the single — there isn’t a single on streaming — but a crop of the YouTube thumbnail. Felt more accurate than DJ Jesus’ album cover.) I not infrequently recount the story of how discovering Titica’s “Olho o Boneco” in 2012 led me to engaging with Angolan music, and then eventually to all transatlantic afrodiasporic music. What I don’t mention as often, because there are fewer woke brownie points available for it, is that Ary, Titica’s duet partner on that song, has been just as important to me over the years. She was the one who taught me how to listen to kizomba, to appreciate grown-up, middle-class African pop and not just the flashy dance and politically-engaged stuff, even to get a particularly African sense of humor that doesn’t always translate to other continents. She’s a great singer, but more than that she’s an entertainer, and knows how to use her assets in what I think of as a very Mediterranean European (which is to say, Latinate) manner. Re: the video for this song, I am looking respectfully, as the twentysomething online lesbians say. It is her second time acting as a diva for a hypermodern, even futuristic DJ Jesus production; the first time, “Mama”, would have been one of my favorite songs of 2014 if I hadn’t failed to notice it until 2015. (I was looking respectfully then too.) But where “Mama” was a flashy, zooming afrohouse song with mid-2010s bells and whistles anticipating Pongo’s entire career, “Loka” is a steamy, exquisitely timed, electro-kizomba with long stretches in which both Jesus and Ary make you squirm waiting for the next beat. Ary turned forty in 2025; I had begun to suppose that she was transitioning out of music before a series of collabs with fellow veteran Yuri da Cunha rocked the early part of 2025 almost as much as this drop rocked the later part of it. I hadn’t realized how much I missed her brilliant smile in my music video diet.

7. Musteerifa, “Ojalá”
(Prod. DJ Brader) • Cuba

I noted being excited about Musteerifa in my Cuban runners-up list, but I didn’t go into why I failed to appreciate her in 2024, which was that, shamefully, I read her masc fashion and cock-crow voice as actually being those of a callow young man and had dismissed her out of hand. (The algorithm, apparently knowing I would enjoy her better than I knew myself, had pushed her on me early.) It wasn’t until I read a passing reference to her with female pronouns in some comment section or other that I realized my error and scrambled to catch back up. Ideally, I will be less skeptical of androgyny — not to mention masculinity itself — in future, although having some winnowing tools when faced with the mass of music I am has always been helpful. Anyway, “Ojalá” was my favorite Musteerifa song of the year, not just because the group chant of the title refrain is really easy to get stuck in my head, but because it’s a song of betrayed love that isn’t vituperative but clear-eyed and generous, wishing the betrayer well — far away from the singer. The lyrics don’t gender anything, but the actress in the video makes it clear that this is a lesbian breakup, and Musteerifa has acknowledged on social media that she is a lesbian — but clarified, in classic Latine fashion, that she’s just as importantly a daughter, a mother, and a humanitarian. “Ojalá” is a vernacular Spanish interjection literally meaning “God willing” but usually translated as “I hope” — it comes, of course, from a reduction of the Arabic “inshallah,” a relic of the centuries of Islamic rule in Spain. Things have been different before, and they can be again. Ojalá que se hace.

6. Gyakie, “Sankofa”
(Prod. Afrolektra) • Ghana

Hoo boy. I just burst out sobbing when I listened to this song preparatory to writing this blurb, which I gather means that there is no possible way I can communicate to you what it means to me. That’s been true of Gyakie since I first learned of her in 2021, and she’s been a fixture of these lists ever since — except for 2024, when either a) I was determined to prove myself not a simp, or b) she didn’t release anything notable. (But she is of course in the 2025 West African runners-up, so that makes up for it.) I’ve also written that she made my favorite song of the 2020s (the first song I ever noticed her singing), and although I might not rank things the same way today there’s no question that she’d be high up. Give me a few more months with “Sankofa,” in fact, and it might dethrone “Need Me.” God, everything about it. The muttered invocation of Sankofa, one of the most important Adinkra symbols in Ghanaian culture, with an association of going back into the past in order to carry its lessons into the future (cough cough the name of this blog). The strings after she sings “I’m fonna sing you some Alicia Keys.” The sheer heartbreaking melody of it — it could be wordless, with no literal meaning attached anywhere at all, and it would make me want to tear up. I haven’t even ever really watched the video, because I get overwhelmed by the music every time. Those immense kettledrums, like this is some goddamn Céline Dion anthem, except Gyakie muttering in the back of her throat about never loving anyone else is as far as you can get from that. I dunno. Like I said, I can’t communicate it. Either you listen and hear what I do or you don’t. I’m not even sure I do on a second pass. Ambushed by unexpected orchestration, I guess.

5. Nailah Blackman, “Busy Body”
(Prod. Anson Pro) • Trinidad & Tobago

Another year, another winnowing down which of the several potential Nailah Blackman bangers is going to be my favorite. (I won’t bother linking everything I’ve ever written about her, but just in the last year: my 2024 favorite Nailah song, my first favorite Nailah song, my all-time favorite Nailah song, my 2025 runner-up Nailah song.) “Busy Body” doesn’t make me want to burst into tears, but lines like “whine up mi bumpa when mi touch road,” “I got a paycheck and a girl must bubble,” “had to take me out, had to eat me like sushi,” “even my pum pum pay dividends” are going to be ringing in my head forever. The beat, light soca supported by bassy amapiano judder, is a good metonym for Nailah’s attitude: sassy and wisecracking, but with a true capitalist’s ruthless seriousness underneath it all.

4. Bad Bunny, “Baile Inolvidable”
(Prod. MAG, Big Jay, Julito, La Paciencia, Elikai) • Puerto Rico

I didn’t get around to finalizing my 2024 list until June 2025, which meant that I didn’t let myself start listening to 2025 music until I posted it. Half an hour into that first listening session, I posted “well, just saw the video for Bad Bunny's ‘Baile Inolvidable’ and now i'm a mess.” Trying to squeeze all of 2025 into the last seven months of the year (plus the first three of this one) has left me felt like I’m running a marathon that everyone else has already finished. I had had my head down so much that I hadn’t even realized that Debí Tirar Más Fotos (I am not doing the capitalization fuckery, Benito, I love you but that is a bridge too far) was doing even bigger business than usual for Bad Bunny; I’d enjoyed him since “I Like It”, I’d been emotionally affected by “Callaíta”, I thought “Yo Perreo Solo” was one of the most important records of the 2020s; but I’d wandered away from keeping up with him after that, especially since ditching Twitter and losing the ability to take the temperature of the average Latin music fan at a glance. My first clue that things were different this album cycle was Kelefah Sanneh’s piece for the New Yorker, something I couldn’t have imagined happening five years ago, let alone fifteen. The Super Bowl halftime announcement came, the inevitable culture war revved into gear. I listened to DTMF all the way through for the first time in Februay (I’d heard a bunch of the songs a la carte, since he’d released videos for them). I paid NBC Universal a few bucks on Super Bowl Sunday in order to watch the halftime show live instead of waiting the half hour for it to get posted to YouTube. I lost my mind like every right-thinking person. For the next three weeks my TikTok feed was nothing but Bad Bunny. It was glorious. I watched tha halftime show so many times, watching peeople watch it in order to sing, dance, shout along, scream when their country’s flag appeared, that I have it memorized now. When I started compiling this list in January, this was one of the first songs I put on it. I still kind of expect to hear the abbreviated version from the halftime show, but god those trumpet lines, sounding so much like a chintzy synth the first time they play, until you realize that no, it’s a real band, he’s not just gesturing to salsa, he’s doing it, he’s embracing being a salsa singer while still being a mumbly trap guy with a bro holler, it’s all one music to him and God you know what I think it’s all one music to me now too. Thank you, Benito. Que Dios te bendiga.

3. Zuchu, “Amanda”
(Prod. S2Kizzy) • Tanzania

Everyone together now: “Who the FUCK is Amanda? WHO is Amanda? Who the FUCK is Amanda? WHO is Amanda? AAAAHHH!” I called it my 40th favorite song of the 2020s when it was two months old; it’d be higher now. I’ve had to physically restrain myself from pogoing while waiting for the crosswalk or on a crowded train with it playing in my headphones. It is, as far as I can tell, the only song I have ever successfully introduced to the Bluesky music hive. (It made it to #11 in the 2025 People’s Pop Polls, a meaningful accomplishment considering everything above it was British, American or Rosalía.) I’ve been riding for Zuchu since 2021 (twice) and even though she’s also in my 2025 East African runners-up I feel like I’m still underrating her. “She doesn’t know you have a wife? You tryna dingi-dingi-dingi-danga-die?”

2. IZA & Jota.pê, “Eu e Você”
(Prod. Marcelo Camelo) • Brazil

Oh, IZA put out one full music video in 2025 (that wasn’t a bathetic tie-in to a Netflix Brasil original movie)? Must be my second favorite song of the year. And honestly if this hadn’t dropped I would most likely have waived my standard “full music video” criterion and listed “Caos e Sal” even though it’s just the same (gorgeous) twenty second visual repeating over and over. I am an IZA mark, stan, obsessive, whatever you want to call it, and have been since early 2017, when her first music video, with light BDSM theming, dropped on the Warner Music Brasil channel. But I have enough self-respect to believe that I wouldn’t have continued to be if she didn’t keep rewarding my attention with ravishingly gorgeous music like this, and visuals that keep up. (Although I can’t help noting that it is the first time since 2017 that she has not worked with Felipe Sassi, her longtime videographer. “Fé nas Malucas” was a high note for that collaboration to go out on, I suppose.) She’s gone back to the reggae well for her current creative cycle, one of the traditionally Black genres she returns to again and again (along with R&B and gospel), but in a particularly Brazilian manner: there is dub echo and spaciness here, yes, but there is also the hushed, whispery sound of bossa nova, there is surf/spaghetti western/tropicália guitar, there are bright soul/samba horns, there is (of course) a cuica squeaking away in the background. And then there’s her duet partner, soulful crooner Jota.pê, who is new to me, and startled me with his delicacy and control as a singer. It’s not often that IZA gets outsung on one of her own songs, but it happened here. The chorus, a repetition of the title, simply means “you and I,” and it’s a mantra of connection — emotional, physical, intellectual, sexual, spiritual — and the video, directed by a female choreographer, is a showcase for IZA’s full-body dancing in ways that recall Beyoncé classics like “Partition” or “Drunk in Love.” I try to focus on the music, so I’m only vaguely aware that IZA has been through a public breakup recently, as well as motherhood: but whatever the biographical details, her grown-woman expressiveness has never been greater.

1. Queen's Tafari, “Ilegal”
(Prod. AstrallBass) • Colombia

When I drew up my list of favorite 2020s songs in September of 2025, I didn’t put this song on it, not because I didn’t know it — it was released in May, and I’d broken my self-imposed pre-2024 list publication embargo to listen to it — but because I was worried about keeping the list balanced and there were already two Afro-Colombian songs I didn’t want to lose. But even as I was posting that countdown, I found myself compulsively listening and relistening to “Ilegal,” and watching the video and feeling Big Feelings to it and eventually posted about it (and was gratified to see it connect with people I respect). But I should note that the feelings I feel to “Ilegal” are not similar to the feelings I feek to “Con Otra” or “Sankofa” or “Baile Inolvidable” or “Eu e Você” above — those are personal, intimate feelings about love, loss, regret, longing. “Ilegal” is about collectivity, about politics in the most brutal meaning of the exercise of power, about what and who is declared illegal and what it means to find community within, underneath, and in defiance of that label. Now, obviously, the specific Afro-Colombian cultural milieu the song was made within, by, of and for is not the beseiged U.S. blue-state milieu I’m hearing it in; Jahqueena and Momma Jhene are rapping from within a boasting-about-their-lyrical-prowess context (with a bit of a Rastafarianism-being-an-unprotected-religious-culture subtext), not a defending-your-neighbors-from-ICE context. But the great thing about pop is how many different uses it can be put to, and “Ilegal” has stiffened my spine to engage in offline activism more than any other piece of culture in 2025. “Security! Llegó Babylon” (Babylon has come), they call out at one point, which is on one level a joke, calling security guards on the existence of an oppressive state, but I also hear in it a call for solidarity. We are each other’s security. Babylon, in the Rastafarian eschatology, reigns; but the people, raucous and reckless and giddy and red-eyed and full of sublime overconfidence and horned-up beyond reason, will rise and overthrow it. “Suena fantastic” (it sounds fantastic), indeed. Oh, and the music rips. Afro-Latin dancehall forever.

I’m a little conflicted about the exercise otherwise. While I count it a success in terms of what I myself got out of it — deepening and explicating my relationship to all kinds of music, as well as necessarily learning more about the vast interconnected web within which it resides, as do we all — I don’t know that it was much use to anyone else except a handful of fellow global-music obsessives (shout out Dave and Brad in particular), none of whom, of course, share exactly my sensibilities (and what a boring world it would be if we all did). Part of this feeling is that I know what my own reaction to having such an overwhelming amount of stuff dumped in front of me over the course of a month would be — “happy for you tho / or sorry that happened” — so I can’t blame anyone else for not assiduously parsing through my sometimes tortured syntax and limited descriptive vocabulary.

I’ve tried to be transparent about my limitations of knowledge and attention, to be truthful rather than artistic or hyperbolic in my assessments, to leach out, as much as possible, the imposture of the expert insider which suffused so many of the music-critic voices I absorbed as a young man that I still find myself falling into it out of habit. I am not an expert: I have a rudimentary grasp on a handful of languages, I am curious, and I am pretty good at looking things up. I am also extremely idiosyncratic in my consumption patterns, having so destroyed any semblance of a normal human relationship with media in the effort to have Opinions about it that I might actually, over the course of a given year, listen to less music than anyone else who could claim to love it. Thirty average people — non-critics, even non-music fans — who are actually from the thirty regions, scenes, genres, or demographics I’ve been writing about in these pages would have been better positioned to discuss most of the music I’ve been talking about than I am. But because I’m the one person in the world who wants to talk about it all together, I’ve condemned myself to doing these writeups, insufficient and surface-level as they are.

Anyway, enough navel-gazing. Ten more songs to enjoy. And I do mean enjoy: although we’ve wandered through a lot of different moods, tempos and vibes over the course of these thirty days, a Brazilian list should be nonstop bangers. These are songs to get hype to, to make you feel good, to contribute more dancing to the world. It would be a shame not to respond in kind.

None of the streaming services are playing nice with my attempts to embed a playlist, so in order to listen you’ll have to click through to the service of your choice:

Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal // YouTube Music

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

2025 Favorites: Brazil

1. Marina Sena ft. Psirico, “Carnaval”

(Prod. Janluska, enzo dicarlo, Pedro Lucas, Gabriel Duarte Mendes) • Brazil

I think of Marina Sena like Baby Consuelo or Ana Torroja: the frontwoman of a relatively popular and even groundbreaking (for its time and place) rock band who went on to have a prolific and more financially rewarding solo career in the following decade. In Sena’s case, the band(s) only lasted for a few years in the late 2010s, but they were enough to launch her on a significant pop trajectory. This collaboration with drums-and-voice samba outfit Psirico, only released in December, is a remix of a brief song on her May 2025 album Coisas Naturais which combined the funk clave with samba instrumentation; Psirico’s addition of heavy batucada and Márcio Victor’s shouting, plus Sena taking a third verse, makes it more of a song than a sketch.

2. Belli ft. Pocah & Tropa do Bruxo, “Meu Dom”

(Prod. ÉoCrosss) • Brazil

I’ve known Pocah for as long as I’ve been paying any attention to Brazilian music, and have written about her multiple times in these pages. But Belli was new to me, as she apparently was to most people, having only debuted in 2024. A native of Floranópolis on the southern coast of Brazil (I will just note gently that yesterday’s entry was heavily concentrated on the north for a reason), she’s been rapidly embraced by the Brazilian pop machine, with several hits just in her first year of activity. This wasn’t one, but the production (courtesy of soccer superstar Ronaldinho Gaúcho’s music venture Tropa do Bruxo), an ice-queen pop-funk with a pagodão skank to the middle eight — along, of course, with my old favorite Pocah as alternate striker — gained my affections anyway.

3. NaBrisa, “Tô na TV”

(Prod. BeatzbyNolan) • Brazil

Nabrisa (a rearrangement of her birth name, Sabrina) started her career as an underground rapper in Rio de Janeiro, and there are still fans in her comments wishing she would go back to the trap scene where she got her start. Commercially they have a point: by YouTube views, her career peaked between 2018 and 2021, when she was a hungry, young, and palely glamorous figure upending expectations by being a blonde girl from a middle-class neighborhood but rapping with real skill. By relative listenership, her career since I’ve noticed her (starting in 2023) might as well not exist; but I enjoy it a lot more, because she’s loosened up as she’s aged into womanhood, adopted a lower-class image, and embraced clave syncopation.

4. MC Mari, “Flauta 2”

(Prod. DJ Perera) • Brazil

Most of my Brazilian funk consumption comes in what is dismissed by purists as pop-funk, where the signature batida is added to a fuller, busier production in order to sound edgy, or commercial, or just Brazilian. Proper funk, the feeling goes, is something like this: sparse, repetitive, a bit harsh, with an untrained, rather nasal vocalist. But even this is a softened pop sequel to the original “Flauta” from 2021, with bigger-budget orientalism in DJ Perera’s update of his original beat and in Mari’s uluating. And even that was pretty pop itself; the really vivid, fithly underground funk is almost always made by teenagers and I rarely feel good about taking it in. Not that this isn’t filthy: flauta (flute) is already phallic, and Mari’s “ela subiu, desceu” (she went up, went down) refrain is not intended to leave much to the imagination. But I couldn’t resist another example of noticing orientalism in 2025.

5. Ruivinha de Marte, “Te Amo, Te Amo, Te Amo”

(Prod. DJ Alle Mark) • Brazil

Now this is the poppest of funk, using a percussion patch that sounds more like reggaeton (not to mention the dancehall stabs) than the classic funk batida. But then no one would have ever expected it to be gritty authentic funk: Ruivinha de Marte (little redhead from Mars) is an indigenous Brazilian social-media influencer from the state of Amazonas who blew up on TikTok via self-deprecating humor, and her pop career since 2021 has largely been meme-fueled. Her 2025 turn towards attempting to make straightforward pop music has attracted a smaller audience, but I adore the earnest sweetness of this simple love song — I love you, I love you, I love you.

6. Kaê Guajajara, “Entre Eu e Você”

(Prod. Guilherme Nakata, Patrickzaun) • Brazil

But the most important indigenous Brazilian pop artist of the 2020s is probably Kaê Guajajara, born in Maranhão but raised in a Rio favela due to the violence her mother faced as an indigenous woman in a region threatened by the logging industry. She’s used her music as a platform to protest the longstanding mistreatment of indigenous Brazilians and the land they protect as well as to demonstrate their participation in modernity rather than being frozen in a poverty-stricken, historicized state of nature: this seductive but sweet urban love song, mixing elements of reggae, samba, and Guajajara vocal performance, is sung primarily in Portuguese but includes her native language towards the end. Although she’s been active since 2019, she has only recently earned enough momentum within the Brazilian pop industry to shoot traditional music videos; her primary outlet for the bulk of her career has been social media.

7. LEOA, “Malokera”

(Prod. Gabriel SOuto, Walter Nazário) • Brazil

Like Marina Sena, Luísa Nascimento is the former frontwoman of a successful regional band, Luísa e os Alquimistas, which started in 2015 and broke up in 2024. I’d only vaguely been aware of their “bregapunk” style, shaped by the city of Natal in the far northeast, but as a solo artist Luísa, now LEOA, has really jumped out at me. On this song she adopts a rubbery dancehall beat and an approachable reggaeton-style flow that fits in perfectly with my interest in transnational cross-pollination, but her lyrics are still super Brazilian, describing herself as a “maloqueira” or tough street girl, but also playing on a second sense of the word: knockoff merchandise sold on the street.

8. Bea Duarte, “Décadanse”

(Prod. Beatwill, Bea Duarte) • Brazil

There’s a whole world of Brazilian indie that is flying completely under my rader thanks to my focus on urban dance and afrodiasporic genres, but I couldn’t resist indiepop chanteuse Bea Duarte’s “Décadanse,” not just because of the mambo piano and zouk and reggaeton rhythms that punctuate it as theatrical flourishes, though they didn’t hurt. The song’s parent album is a conceptual cycle based on Italian commedia dell’arte, and she’s having fun mashing all kinds of Latinate cultures together, including French existentialism in the title phrase, fusing the French words for decadence and dance into one gothy refrain.

9. Danny Bond ft. Irmãs de Pau, “Chacina”

(Prod. PZZS) • Brazil

Brazil’s trans pop scene is unparalleled in the world, especially in how visible and mainstream it is. I praised Villano Antillano’s visibility in the Puerto Rico entry, but there are some dozens of Brazilian performers at her level or above (not all of whom would necessarily identify as trans; the Latin American travesti model of gender identity, which can include drag, is useful background knowledge). Visibility, of course, doesn’t mean safety — Brazil’s transfemicide rate, especially against Black women, is globally shameful. There’s a reason why women like Danny Bond and the Irmãs de Pau — all three trans women of color — make excessive, confrontational, abrasive music like this, which is closer to dark Latin house and, eventually, industrial than to feel-good Brazilian party music, even though lyrically they’re mostly just bragging about their sexual virtuosity.

10. Gaby Amarantos & Zaynara, “Mulher de Amazônia”

(Prod. MGZD) • Brazil

I’m going to close with the first contemporary Brazilian performer I ever fell in love with. Gaby Amarantos, from the northeastern city of Belém, was a pioneer of tecnobrega in the early 2000s, treating corny tourist music with electronic instruments and earning comparisons to Beyoncé for her powerful voice and commitment to entertainment. I first learned of her in 2012, and her surf-cha-cha song “Ex Mai Love” was one of my favorites of the year. I’ve frequently admired her output since, but I’ve gotten into the habit of allowing younger artists to take precedence. Enter Zaynara, who was born just up the Tocantins river from Belém right about when Gaby was starting her career, but who has had a revelatory last couple of years, and whose visualizers from her 2025 album kept getting added to my longlist. But this collaboration for Gaby’s 2025 Rock Doido project, an overview of her career, instantly won my heart: a celebration of their shared Paranese background and the beauty of women from the Amazon Basin, it’s a shot of blissful joy that only thirteen years of loving Gaby Amarantos and half a year of liking Zaynara could have prepared me for.

Tomorrow: The finale. The fifty songs I loved more than any of the 300 I’ve spent the past month month writing about. Please join me in one last celebration of, and farewell to, the music of 2025.

But as I’ve commented elsewhere, Brazil is almost unique in the countries I’m looking at in paying very little attention to the musical trends happening in the rest of my lists. Only Jamaica, Nigeria and South Africa approach the same level of self-sufficiency, and Brazil achieving it without historical ties to the globally export-friendly resource of English is if anything more impressive. The funk clave has been popping up everywhere in these lists, from the Dominican Republic and Spain to Madagascar and Angola, but Brazil has not adopted dembow, konpa, bouyon or reggaeton (not counting Anitta making her regular bids for international attention).

But there’s much more going on than funk here. Especially in this list, which carves out the same demographic slice that entries #15 and #18 did. Funk was created and popularized in the majority-Black favelas of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, but after thirty years it has been thoroughly Brazilianized, which is to say deracinated (though not devulgarized, which is something it has on the history of samba) and adopted as a national sound rather than one tied to class or ethnicity. And by and large, Afro-Brazilians who make Blackness a core part of their musical identity choose to express themselves in other genres.

(This is not unusual historically. The African-American turn to soul, original recipe funk, and hip-hop once rock & roll was thoroughly adopted by white Americans had its own echo in Brazil, as figures like Tim Maia and Sandra de Sá adopted international Black sounds in preference to and in protest of the whitened bossa becoming installed as Brazil’s national sound.)

But it’s also important to recognize that Brazil has always been much less demographically segregated than Colombia, France, or the United States, which means that Blackness exists on a wide spectrum there, and the last thing I want to do is engage in any kind of blood quantum analysis of the musicians represented in this (or the following) list. The music, rather than the musicians, is what I’m most concerned with.

None of the streaming services are playing nice with my attempts to embed a playlist, so in order to listen you’ll have to click through to the service of your choice:

Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal // YouTube Music

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

2025 Favorites: Afro Brazil

1. Bruna Black & Juliana Linhares, “Saudade”

(Prod. Webster Santos) • Brazil

I try pretty hard to keep a bright line between my listening for these contemporary afrodiasporic lists, where I favor futuristic, digital dance forms that take the innovations of dancehall, rap, and electronic music as a baseline, and my twentieth-century listening, where I favor as much deep music-history knowledge and rootsy authenticity as I can get, in part because I’m so often listening to historical periods when that rootsy authenticity was the futuristic dance form of its time. Which is to say that this languid, almost academic exercise in samba-jazz that rises into a kind of wailing art song, with Toninho Ferragutti’s accordion recalling the traditional sounds of forró, tango and even Portuguese folk music, is almost exactly the opposite of the kinds of music I’ve been featuring across these lists. But it’s a useful reminder that not only I, but the people I’m listening to, contain multitudes. Probably no other country but Brazil, and no other language but Portuguese, would have gotten me to sit still for this song until I was overwhelmed by its ecstatic insistence on itself, but since it did, I’ll take the opportunity to point out Bruna Black, a compellingly thoughtful singer from São Paulo whose broad embrace of Brazil’s vast musical heritage begins in, but is not limited to, her Afro-Brazilian roots. Her duet partner, Juliana Linhares, has been a staple of São Paulo’s theatrical indie-rock scene since the mid-2010s; like I said above, there’s far more going on in Brazil than even the deepest dive can cover.

2. Bela Maria, “Tenta a Sorte”

(Prod. Itoo) • Brazil

When I brought up the likes of Tim Maia and Sandra de Sá in the intro, it wasn’t in preparation for this throwback slice of disco-soul, but it’s an apt reference point. Bela Maria is a young r&b singer from Paulista, on the northwest coast, who frequently indulges in a kind of classicism that I don’t often encounter outside of Latin America. I didn’t notice her until 2025, but reviewing her past form makes me wish I’d caught her in 2023. Either way I’m glad to know about her now, as I can never get enough really good non-US r&b.

3. Melly, “Despacha”

(Prod. Állefe, Nave Beatz) • Brazil

Speaking of which! Although Melly, of Salvador, is more of a neo-soul head, with a lush sound that includes Afro-Brazilian percussion elements and a hip-hop flow switchup. She’s also casually queer in a very Gen-Z way; although the video doesn’t show the gender of the person she’s metaphorically burying (the lyrics are a sympathetic but irrevocable breakup), the affect of the group of women she’s celebrating moving on with at the end is a Tumblr fantasia of LGBT representation. I spent a lot of 2025 regretting coming to musicians late, and Melly is no exception: “Bandida” would have made my 2023 list if I’d known of it in time.

4. Enme ft. Uana, “Lua Cheia”

(Prod. Kafé) • Brazil

The list of contemporary foreign music I said Brazil wasn’t adopting in the intro pointedly did not include amapiano. Enme is a Black drag-pop singer and rapper from the northern state of Maranhão who I’m furious to have not known about until 2025 — my 2018 and 2019 would have been vastly improved by her early work, not to mention everything since. Her duet partner Uana is from Recife and I feel equally criminal for not previously having noticed her work since 2021, particularly in helping to develop brega funk into a full-fledged pop genre rather than a transient novelty. “Lua Cheia” (full moon) is neither brega funk nor rap, but a moody, almost psychedelic amapiano ballad with bits of samba percussion in the verses because of course. Like everything else on this list, it’s only a starting point: there’s much more to explore in every direction.

5. Amabbi & PAPA, “Calma, Shawty”

(Prod. DalePlay) • Brazil

There’s also Brazilian afrobeats! Amabbi has been making creative, melodic urban music in São Paulo for three years, and has gained an audience without necessarily blowing up in ways that are unsustainable. (Brazil’s pop scene is notorious for vacuuming up young would-be stars and spitting them out once they’ve reached the end of their initial capacity to make a record label money.) Her duet partner PAPA has less of a track record, distinctive voice or personality, but the easy lope of the beat, Amabbi’s charismatic attitude, and the wry throwback of the lyrics — “calm down, shawty” — make this a lovely way to spend two and a half minutes.

6. Liniker ft. Priscila Senna, “Pote de Ouro”

(Prod. Fejuca, Gustavo Ruiz, Liniker, Márcio Arantos) • Brazil

At least I’ve been aware of Liniker’s work since 2015, even if I haven’t often noticed it publicly (perhaps because her pronouns have changed since then). both as frontperson of Brazilian queer soul outfit Liniker e os Caramelows and her later, more exalted solo career. This song initially caught my attention for its sonic similarity to Dominican bachata, although its true genre is brega-pop. It can be difficult to translate what “brega” really means in the context of Brazilian music — words like “cheesy,” “corny,” or even “cringe” get close in one sense, but don’t have an obvious sonic referent — in part because it’s a shifting target as trends change over time and the superior attitude of the urban south toward the presumed yokels of the north shifts accordingly. But Priscila Sena is the queen of brega-pop as it’s been embraced and defined as its own proud, coherent tradition in her hometown of Recife. Another word sometimes applied to the genre is “calypso,” since the influence of Caribbean music (traditionally considered naff by Cariocas and Paulistanos, who are more likely to look towards Europe and the US for coolness cues) is evident — and Caribbean music, in a Brazilian context, includes bachata, and so we’ve come full circle.

7. Duquesa, “No Meu Club”

(Prod. Go Dassisti) • Brazil

Technically this is the second half of a double single, and the music video has them as one song, so I’ve rarely listened to just “No Meu Club” (in my club) without having it introduced by “Tãoquente” (so hot), a brief hushed trap anthem. "No Meu Club” is also trappy, but it slinks and whoops rather one-note banging, and Duquesa gets to show of a varied and precise flow. Once again, there’s a whole catalog to dive backwards into: one of her first singles in 2019 was titled “Futurista,” and she’s lived up to that self-description more often than not in the years since.

8. Ryu the Runner ft. Rincon Sapiência & Tasha e Tracie, “Bumbum”

(Prod. 6ee, Douglas Moda, Paiva Prod) • Brazil

Although I enjoy Brazilian funk as much as the next North American culture vulture, I am also fascinated by the continuous effort on the part of Brazilian rappers to distance themselves from it, creating new and vivid beats that could easily be the next big thing in the process. Here, prolific young underground rapper Ryu, the Runner convenes a posse including oldhead Rincon Sapiência (one of my 2010s favorites) and the twins Tasha & Tracie on a track that could easily have been a funk workout — “Bumbum” (boom boom, but also slang for ass moving) is a specific title and refrain that has worked for hundreds of funk songs in the past, but the track’s dank shuffle, with bateria highlights and grab-bag samples, gives it a woozy pulse instead that puts the emphasis on the rapping skill of the participants.

9. Barbarize, “Aquitaquente”

(Prod. Thiago Barromeo) • Brazil

The duo Barbarize also hails from Recife, and their wild blend of vivid sounds includes brega in addition to rock, rap, dance, and manguebeat, an optimistic 1990s blend of local Pernambucan music with international sounds. The electric guitars crunching and wailing on this song remind me specifically of Eddie Hazel, and Funkadelic is a good reference point, if far from the only one, for Barbarize’s eclectic, humorous, political, social-critical, and make-you-get-up-off-your-ass-and-dance music. Once again, I had no idea they existed until this year — and I don’t mean 2025; it was while I was still catching up in February, preparatory to putting this list together, that I finally came into possession of this glorious knowledge.

10. Rachel Reis, “Furacão”

(Prod. Barro, Guillerme Assis) • Brazil

This list is bookended by jazz song, something I don’t think I would have ever considered for another regional scene, but Brazil just hits different. Rachel Reis, from Feira de Santana in Bahia, is a singer-composer with a wide repertoire, a strong musical identity, and searching, ambitious intentionality in how she applies it. This might be the most “world music” of my picks over the course of the month, in that it’s exactly the kind of respectable samba-jazz that the caricature of an NPR listener would like to hear Brazil represented by — but while I both am that caricature and try to organize my listening in opposition to him, I was as much blown away by her lyrics, which I won’t try to translate, as by her musicality.

Tomorrow: what else is there to see in Brazil? What indeed has not been touched by Afro-Brazilians? (Hint: almost nothing.)

Especially as, despite the sweeping title of this entry, it is only covering two countries: Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. (A third country, the tiny islands of São Tomé and Príncipe off the shore of Equatorial Guinea, is eligible, but I didn’t catch anything from there in 2025 that would have insisted on my including it.) Angola we’ve seen (although it could have taken a second day, I fulminate), as we have Cape Verde (but Afro Portugal could have been broken out into its own day, I whine; and not even Afro, if Spainards count as Latin why not Portuguese folk), but lumping the rest of the former Portuguese Empire’s holdings in Africa together when they could hardly be more dissimilar does them a disservice.

Agreed! But then I’ve always had a slightly harder time keeping up with Mozambique’s pop scene compared to Angola’s, for the basic linguistic reason that more than 70% of Angolans speak Portuguese in everyday life, while fewer than half of Mozambicans do. Not to mention that marrabenta, Mozambique’s fast-paced 20th-century dance music, has tended to resist being updated, electronified, or joined up with broader Afropop trends, so it doesn’t fit as cleanly into the global unity of post-dancehall that I like to imagine my far-flung tastes converging into. There’s still plenty of Mozambican music that gets me: kizomba is a constant across urban Portuguese Africa, and there are significant amapiano, afrobeats, dancehall, and rap scenes in Maputo and elsewhere. But I always feel I could be doing better.

Guinea-Bissau has been even more neglected by me, and by the rest of the Western media lansdcape. I chose three Bissau-Guinean tracks for this list (the first time I’d paid such close attention to the country’s musical output since 2015), and only one of them is on streaming services other than YouTube. Luck of the draw? Maybe; but given how may obscure songs from other neglected corners of the world turned up just fine, I have to wonder.

None of the streaming services are playing nice with my attempts to embed a playlist, so in order to listen you’ll have to click through to the service of your choice:

Apple Music* // Spotify* // Tidal* // YouTube Music

(*Note that Apple, Spotify and Tidal are all missing three songs.)

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

2025 Favorites: Portuguese Africa

1. Lukie ft. Hernâni, “Tambulani”

(Prod. High Quality) • Mozambique

This is a familiar format to the survivors of my Cape Verde list: a sweet-voiced woman singing a winsome r&b-inflected kizomba, while a male rapper comes in on the second half to provide some grounding ballast. The singer is Lukie, who got her start performing covers on YouTube in 2016; the rapper is Hernâni, whose first mixtapes hit the streets of Maputo in the mid-2000s when he was barely a teenager. The melodic sensibility on display here is very fine, and Lukie spending a lot of the song singing low in the back of her throat is a sure-fire way to get me to fall in love with a song. The video’s title card includes a parenthetical to the title, “(Escolho a Ti)” or “I choose you,” if you couldn’t tell it was romantic sweetness from tip to tail.

2. Elisa Morena, “I na Mata Cabeça”

(Prod. Mane Prod) • Guinea-Bissau

The first of three songs that are YouTube-only as of this writing, presumably because the music industry is so skeletal in Guinea-Bissau that there aren’t a lot of pipelines set up to disseminate it outside of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, where Elisa Morena is active and where she gets way more views than the full-length videos on YouTube do. But as a dinosaur who prefers to listen to music at full length (3:09, a true marathon) rather than in brief clips while being sold things, I really like her music. I wouldn’t consider myself competent to categorize it confidently, although it seems likely to be a 2020s update on gumbe, the post-independence vernacular dance of the region, with plenty of influence from afrobeats, kizomba, and soukous. The lyrics are in Kiriol, the widespread Bissau-Guinean creole, and I’m not qualified to guess as to its meaning, but the music compels you to dance.

3. Dama do Bling ft. TheThree, “Lyasuka”

(Prod. Helio Beatz) • Mozambique

The first Mozambican performer I ever ran across when I made my preliminary investigations into the Afro-Luso scene was rapper Dama do Bling (Lady of Bling), whose stage name is an indication of just how long she’s been at it. She was the sensation of Southern Africa in 2007, when “Dança do Remexe” was a bold African take on Brazilian baile funk, and almost twenty years later here she is delivering her own aggressive, humorous take on mozapiano, the Mozambican variant on amapiano. Her guest is the only remaining member of Maputo rap crew TheThree, who failed to set the world on fire ten years ago, but he’s in good with the Dama, and acquits himself well here. The song has the parenthetical “(Hi Punch)” on YouTube, thanks to the aggro refrain suggesting the pain that awaits you if you get in her way.

4. Ell Professor, “Coloca”

(Prod. Afro Moment) • Mozambique

Ell Professor’s YouTube profile lists his location as the Netherlands, but it was created in 2012 and a lot can change in thirteen years. Before about 2023, his online activity seems to have been mostly in comedy and social satire (pretty much always set in Mozambique), but his musical career, short-lived as it has been so far, feels much more like that of someone comfortable with European modes of production than of an upstart Mozambican making do. “Coloca” is pure Luso-afrobeats, but he makes it work with a surprisingly sensitive vocal performance, and the video, shot by a stalwart of the Mozambican music industry, is slick and sexy in a familiar mid-budget way.

5. Mimãe, “Tsakeni”

(Prod. Fredy richlife) • Mozambique

Mimãe’s largest amount of Spotify streams comes from Maputo, but her second-largest comes from Johannesburg, an indication of how seriously mozapiano is taken in the source. (It helps that this song is at least partly in Zulu, and the producer and co-writer Nkosananaizy are both South African.) Regardless, I’ve been a fan of her take on the genre for almost as long as I’ve been listening to amapiano in the first place, and not just because the cross-cultural ties give me, the committed internationalist, a secure footing to latch onto. Like a lot of Mozambican singers, she sings in local languages rather than Portuguese, but her singing is strong enough, even when electronically treated, that my not understanding the words feels less important than usual. For what it’s worth, Google Translate says that “Tsakeni” means “enjoy,” which would be solid advice if I hadn’t already been doing just that for months.

6. Felmanha, “Gimme Faya”

(Prod. Natty Pro) • Portugal (Guinea-Bissau)

The Spotify listens for Felmanha Correia, meanwhile, are small enough that only one location is listed, with 4 monthly liseners: her parents’ home city of Bissau. Not even Portugal, her birthplace, where she has already had a reasonably successful modeling career, and where this song was presumably produced, makes the list. But this was her debut single, and it’s a smoky kizomba in English and Portuguse on the standard early-release topic of mutual seduction, although she takes time to shout out her own melinated beauty (because Europe, sigh). She’s released a futher three songs since, with hopefully more on the horizon; although I’m enjoying local sounds too, I’m very glad to get to know a Bissau-Guinean with such a cosmopolitan sound.

7. Mr. Bow ft. Ziqo, “Safadinha”

(Prod. Mr. Dino) • Mozambique

I said above that marrabenta resists being modernized, but on the other hand modernists have no trouble dipping into marrabent for some rootsy credibility. I’d known of Mr. Bow and Ziqo since my first excavations into Afro-Luso music in 2015, where I met Bow as an old-school rapper and Ziqo as an Afro-dancehall artist with a song just as focused on ass-shaking as this one, but I hadn’t really kept up with them in the decade since, so it was a revelation to hear this song and realize that they too have embraced the post-dancehall wave: this song has very African rhythms (including log-drum strikes acting like steel-drum hits), but it moves like it knows what reggaeton and konpa have in common, and the marrabenta breakdown toward the end (the guitar-drums-and-marimba part) is an ecstatic rush

8. Mitchy Baby, “Bo Dixan”

(Prod. Mane Prod) • Guinea-Bissau

Our second Bissau-Guinean song actually produced within the country (and by the same producer, and the videos even have similar color grading) is a delightful little old-school kizomba from a winning young singer. I am not really competent to parse Kiriol, but I gather that she’s telling a would-be lover not to pay attention to gossip about her. The video being set in a traditional rural dwelling makes me think that its cultural coding is perhaps comparable to country music, but the horn samples and her slight vocal treatment are all quite modern. Not that those are mutually exclusive; I’ve seen enough African TikToks making fun of Western assumptions of African life to be cautious about imputing “traditional” norms anywhere.)

9. Layla Zen, “Te Quero”

(Prod. Big Man) • Mozambique

Although I’ve been talking about Maputo a lot, Mozambique is a big country, and pop happens all over. Layla Zen is attempting to make it work in Nampula, the third-largest city in the country. As a result, perhaps, this is the only Mozambican song to not be on streaming services. It’s another sweetly-sung kizomba, this time in a high, breathless voice evoking the giddy rush of first love: “Te Quero” means “I want you.”

10. Assa Matusse, “Teka Ndzingu”

(Prod. Claudio Jaftha) • Mozambique

We bid farewell to the African continent one last time with a song that could, for the most part, have been recordd any time in the last forty years: jazzy r&b (and vocals that live up to that description) with a disco shuffle (although there are of course distinctly African percussion elements in the mix), it’s a relatable complaint about faithless men and difficulties inherent in life, turning ineluctably into a joyous celebration of life because that’s what music, and very nearly music alone, has the power to do. The first verse is in English to reel in international customers like me, but the rest, if Google is correct, is in Tsonga, a language shared between southern Mozambique and northeastern south Africa, and there are definitely South African influences at work here. I didn’t know Assa Matusse before this video floated into my recommendations last fall, but I’m eager to hear more from her now.

Tomorrow: we’ll be lavishing our final two entries on Brazil and not even making a dent in the immensity and variety of its output. See you there.

The population of Cape Verde is among Africa’s smallest, at under a half million, although demographic studies report that a larger Cape Verdean population may be resident in Europe and North America than on the islands themselves. Which is why I’ve added Portugal to this list: especially in the field of pop music, Cape Verdeans interested in a career in the arts generally live at least part-time in Lisbon.

In part because of that easy access to diasporic institutions and resources, Cape Verde hits well above its weight class in terms of pop. Traditional musics like morna, funaná, and coladeira have all adapted and grown over time (incorporating, in the 21st century, electronic and hip-hop elements) so that they are still distinct pop forms today, and in the 2010s Cape Verdean singers widely embraced Angolan kizomba, the Afro-Luso evolution of zouk. And in the streaming era, pan-African musical fashions are jumped on everywhere.

And of course (as we’ve already seen), the African diaspora in Portugal is diverse. Some of the songs in the list below could easily have been in yesterday’s, and it’s only some abstruse hairsplitting that put them here; but it’s a handy way to gather the diverse strains of Afro-Luso pop that are centered in Europe.

Pace, by the way, to any Wikipedia editors out there preparing to push up their glasses and scold me for calling Cape Verdean music Lusophone, when it’s almost universally sung in Kriolu, and so is technically creolophone. Kriolu is derived from Portuguese in the same way Haitian Kréyol is derived from French and Jamaican Patwa from English; the linguistic sphere is the important thing.

None of the streaming services are playing nice with my attempts to embed a playlist, so in order to listen you’ll have to click through to the service of your choice:

Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal // YouTube Music

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

2025 Favorites: Cape Verde/Portugal

1. Jennifer Dias & Apollo G, “Tequila e Sal”

(Prod. Elji Beatzkilla) • Cape verde/Portugal (Cape Verde)

I’ll be a Jennifer Dias stan till the day I die, I guess; she was one of the first Cape Verdean singers I ever came across when I first started looking, and she’s still standing, an independent artist who has made it without getting in bed with a major label. Every music video still ends with a reminder to like and subscribe like it’s 2013, but at least she’s getting the revenue. It helps that she can call on major names both past and present in Cape Verdean urban music to help her out: Apollo G is a very popular Portuguese rapper, and the producer, about which more later, is a veritable modern legend. This easygoing kizomba duet moseys along for two minutes before vibe shifting hard into spacy kuduro-house, a signature move for Dias.

2. Josslyn ft. Mark Delman, “Gotham City”

(Prod. Dann Cruz) • Cape Verde/Portugal (Cape Verde)

This is more like major label Kriolu kizomba, again starring a Cape Verdean woman with a male rapper guest. Josslyn has been a fixture of the kizomba scene since 2018, and Mark Delman has been flying under my radar as a contributor to the Caboverdian/Portuguese hip-hop scene since 2015. This sultry invitation to party like you’re on the mean streets patrolled by Batman takes plenty of inspiration from contemporary afrobeats, but there’s a lightness characteristic of Cape Verdean pop that keeps it from getting too sweaty or navel-gazing.

3. Neyna & Loose Jr, “Ka Ficam Sábi”

(Prod. Sandro Beatz) • Cape Verde

Possibly the biggest female Cape Verdean star of the decade (and not just because she’s a tall drink of water), Neyna shows her elders Jennifer and Josslyn up a bit here (at least in a commercial sense), with the third kizomba beween a singing woman and a rapping man in a row. Loose Jr has also been flying under the radar a bit (his discography is split across several profiles on Spotify that have yet to be merged), but his hungry, urgent verse might be the best showing a man has made yet today. Even though the song’s gentler and more romantic than its predecessors, there’s nothing like youth to grab attention.

4. Elji Beatzkilla, “Sbo Sabia”

(Prod. Elji Beatzkilla) • Cape Verde

Elji Beatzkilla is the goofiest but also the most experimental of the generation of Cape Verdean performers who came of age in the early 2010s. I think of him, bizarrely enough, as a cross between Bad Bunny and Weird Al Yankovic — like a lot of Cape Verdean producers, he has assimilated the ethos if not the specific sound reggaeton, but he insists on doing it in his own weird, light-entertainment way. This is an electro-coladeira song that incorporates both baile funk and reggaeton at different points, and which no explication of the lyrics could do better than watching the owners of the asses in the video do what they’re being paid to.

5. Elly Paris ft. Ricky Boy, “Vroom Vroom”

(Prod. Delmar Diniz) • Cape Verde

I always get a little thrill when a brand-new, scrappily-funded artist I noticed for the first time years ago proves that I was right to pay attention. Checking the timeline, I guess 2018 was a while ago now, and Elly Paris has certainly done worthwhile work in the interim, but this Kriolu reggaeton song was an immediate add to my shortlist when the video dropped in October. Ricky Boy, who has been a popular zouk/r&b crooner scene since 2009, does his best dancehall toasting as backup, but it’s Elly’s show, taking the common global symbol of revving engines as a metaphor for exercising other kinds of riding mastery.

6. MC Tupa Tupa, “Banho di Manguera”

(Prod. Nely Beat) • Cape Verde

The nice thing about doing these thirty lists is it gives me room to recognize at least some of 2025’s crop of brand-new, scrappily-funded artists. MC Tupa Tupa is a Cape Verdean singer-rapper working with a Portuguese production house and whose slim catalog to date is primarily Angolan-style afrohouse. “Banho di Manguera” isn’t heads and shoulders better than the rest of her output in 2025, but it was the one that came across my notice. And browsing through, it does have rather more authority and oomph to its exhortations to party, with label boss Lavvy contributing the chorus hook. And I think I’ve mentioned before how much I appreciate hearing from even would-be pop stars who aren’t rail-thin.

7. Aryh, “Batota”

(Prod. Carlos Neves) • UK (Portugal/Angola)

I’m going off Aryh’s current Spotify bio, which says she was born in Portugal to Angolan parents and is now based in the UK, but the fact that the song is half in English would seem to bear it out. Although the other half is in a very Portuguese style of afrobeats, and her label, My Vibe Music, is based in Lisbon. I’ve been waching My Vibe’s output for a decade and this may be the first time I’ve ever listed something of theirs — it’s Aryh’s debut single, and it’s her freeform attitude, the confidence with which she approaches both English and Portuguese, and (as important) the very 2020s throb of amapiano bass kicking her out of the label’s usual respectful kizomba doldrums, which won my heart.

8. Rony Fuego, “Energy”

(Prod. Ransom Beatz) • Portugal (Angola)

I’ve been noticing Rony Fuego in public since 2022, and I’m going to continue until he stops putting out good music. Although he was born in Angola to Congolese parents, his adult career has all been in Portugal, and he’s adopted a wide-ranging afrobeats style that, here, includes soukous-style guitar played by Ruben Sequeira. But only the title word, a common refrain for hustle-culture not-quite-pop stars, is in English; the rest is in engagingly literate, skillfully toasted Portuguese. Although I like him a lot, Rony hasn’t quite broken out to the broader listening public yet.

9. Nenny, “Ficar Por Cima”

(Prod. Daus, Fumaxa) • Portugal (Cape Verde)

Portuguese r&b singer Nenny is in the enviable position of having every release be an event. High-profile collabs with living legends Anselmo Ralph and Nelson Freitas and afropop girlie Yasmine and the sweetly sensual “Sdds” were equally tempting to me, but this rhythmically varied grindset anthem, which sounds a bit like if Rihanna had coladeira as a rhythmic bed to draw from, took the prize largely because I’d spent more time with it than any of the competition. Nenny is only 23 years old, which makes me deeply excited to see what the next six years of her career will be like, since I’ve enjoyed the last six so much.

10. Kady, “Emorio”

(Prod. Aladdin) • Portugal (Cape Verde)

There are nine credited lyricists on this piece of music, and for once it’s not because of samples. The melody was developed in the studio without lyrics, and everyone present (including label head Djodje and Mark Delman from #2 above) helped brainstorm them when it came time to lay down the vocal track. According to an Instagram story, Kady remembered a concert where she was embarrassed to realize she didn’t know the lyrics to the Gilberto Gil classic “Emoriô,” but the title phrase, a Lusicization of the Yoruba for “I see you,” stuck in her head. The resulting song is a quietly powerful piece of soulful, spiritual kizomba, sounding a bit as if Enya or Sade were Cape Verdean instead of Irish or British, with a striking video centering modern dance, Lisbon streetscapes, and veteran singer Kady’s own regal bearing under all kinds of lighting. She’s credited with being the originator of “kizomba consciente,” or “conscious kizomba,” addressing political, social, and spiritual matters in addition to romantic ones. It’s very much on me that I hadn’t particularly noticed her until now.

Tomorrow: back to the African mainland. Mozambique and Gineau-Bissau await. After that, we cross the Atlantic one last time.

Although I’d dabbled in rooting through Ghanaian pop as early as 2011, and done some surface-level global pop tourism for TheAtlantic.com in 2012 (which, thank god for the paywall, it’s all cringe now), it wasn’t until 2015, feeling miserably disconnected from anything that was going on in the U.S. or associated countries, that I started digging into global scenes, with Angola at the forefront thanks to falling in love with Titica and Ary back in 2012. I listened to everything I could find from Angola in 2015, and soon expanded that to browsing through Mozambique, Cape Verde, and Afro-descended artists in Portugal and Brazil, with YouTube as my primary engine for discovery, as Spotify was still severely behind in cataloging global music, and SoundCloud too anonymous and diffuse.

Not that YouTube is a superlative archive; I just looked up the playlist of every Angolan song to receive a music video I could find that I kept over the course of 2016, and more than 30% of it has been deleted or privated. I’m confident that the links I’m sending out in each of these entries will be equally decimated (or whatever the Latin for reduced by thirty percent is) in a decade’s time. At least now I know to make my own archive.

But it was listening to and learning about Angolan pop that taught me how to listen to contemporary African pop more broadly, and even taught me how to understand the kinds of Latin and Caribbean music where groove matters above everything. It might be too much to say that I wouldn’t be as deeply into reggaeton, dancehall and afrobeats without first having spent a lot of time with kizomba, semba and kuduro, but they were definitely the route I took to being deeply into konpa, amapiano, coupé-décalé, baile funk, dembow, salsa choke, soca and bouyon.

But as I expanded my listening to include as much of the transatlantic Afrodiaspora as I could, Angola sometimes fell a little by the wayside. Many of the pop artists who thrilled me in the mid-2010s continued to age alongside me, and either stopped making music or made music that didn’t appeal to me as much; and although younger artists continued to emerge I didn’t always get the same spark from them. Time changes all things, of course; and some of the changes I’ve sensed in the Angolan pop sphere are probably downstream of political changes, as the local music industry had been tied closely to a now-departed regime. But it was nice that my expanded listening in 2025 gave me an excuse to pay more attention to Angolan music, and not just my half-dozen or so trusty favorites, than I have for many years past.

There were (as always) a lot of really great songs I had to leave off for lack of space, which is a good problem to have. And although my main focus here is on the triangle between kizomba (the lushly romantic Afro-Luso variation on zouk), kuduro (the hard-charging dance music of the Luanda slums), and afrohouse (the tasteful modern electronic dance music, inevitably enormously influenced by South Africa), there are of course lots of different kinds of music being made in Angola today. Maybe someday I’ll get around to figuring out how to write about some of the stuff I respect and think is important but doesn’t touch me deeply. Until then, here’s what did:

None of the streaming services are playing nice with my attempts to embed a playlist, so in order to listen you’ll have to click through to the service of your choice:

Apple Music* // Spotify* // Tidal* // YouTube Music

(*Note that Apple, Spotify, and Tidal are all missing one song.)

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

2025 Favorites: Angola

1. Lurdes Miranda, “Luz do Sol”

(Prod. Mad Superstar, Deejay Slash) • Angola

Is this 3-step? I think it might be 3-step. But my genre parsing skills aside it’s definitely South African-influenced house. Lurdes Miranda is a rising star in Angolan pop; like a lot of them, she tends to split her time between Luanda and Portugal, where there is a large Angolan diaspora (thirty years of civil war on the heels of four hundred years of colonization will do that). She tends to shift between genres in a very Angolan way; her other 2025 singles I considered were kizomba, trap, and afrobeats. But this, with its uplifting, soulful, joyous hustle, even bleeding into jazz toward the end, is not just my favorite of her songs so far but the perfet way to open this sequence.

2. Zara Williams, “Bina”

(Prod. Gaby, Agatchu) • Angola (Congo-Kinshasa)

Many of the institutions and brands I became acquainted with in order to follow Angolan music in 2015 have either gone moribund or pivoted elsewhere in the decades since, but Nellson Klasszik, the Swiss-Angolan mogul behind some of the biggest hitmakers in the Lusophone Old World, is still going strong. His newest starlet, recently poached from rival mogul C4 Pedro, is Zara Williams, who was born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo but raised in Angola. This song is in Congolese Lingala, was produced by a French team, and shot in Europe; “Bina” means dance, and despite the expensive nightclub video, she’s singing about dancing in a small African village where everyone knows everybody else. It’s structured like a kizomba aonf, but I don’t recognize the actual rhythmic pulse; I assume it’s a Congolese one I’m not educated enough to be aware of.

3. Suzanna & John Trouble, “Não Tô a Parar”

(Prod. Ricky Ndombashi, Sandro Beatz) • Angola

We’re easing into the kuduro stretch of the playlist with this, and in contrast with Zara Williams you can immediately tell the difference between a young Angolan woman with a lavish European team behind her and a young Angolan woman with a scrappy Angolan team. Suzanna sings her diva parts well, selling the afrohouse half of the song, but John Trouble’s kuduro rapping, with the characteristic bellowed snarl the genre has in Luanda, makes it clear we aren’t in international territory any more: this is down and dirty music by Angolans for Angolans. The title means “I’m Not Gonna Stop,” and the fact that the song does eventually end is the only thing that makes them liars.

4. Telmo Kebra & Mary Hill, “Chupeta”

(Prod. Paulo Kibrilha, Savana Bom de Beat) • Angola

Not on streaming klaxon! Telmo Kebra and Mary Hill both have a bunch of music on the standard streaming services, but this one appears to be a YouTube exclusive, although whether intentionally so or otherwise will probaly always be unclear to me. This is kuduro one level removed from the street (where John Trouble’s vocal style comes from) — big, bombastic, and filthy, it’s very much in a dancehall vein. “Chupeta” means “lollipop,” and its use as an analogy for other items that can be licked and sucked has a long and proud tradition in Lusophone urban music. This was my introduction to Mary Hill, who like Lurdes Miranda and Suzanna has only been active for two years — it’s the most exciting thing she’s put out with a video, and I’m intrigued to hear what else she has. Assuming she gets the chance; the dismal viewcount here is a reminder that my taste is and has always been entirely orthogonal to the Angolan population’s.

5. Filho do Zua ft. Noite e Dia & Tshunami, “Parte a Coluna”

(Prod. teo no Beat) • Angola

It wouldn’t be a list of great Angolan songs after 2019 without a Teo no Beat production. I don’t know of anyone better at folding kuduro into broader, more universal sounds without removing its essential jolting violence. But the marquee name here is Filho do Zua, whose rich, soulful voice has been a mainstay of Angolan kizomba and semba since 2017. Noite e Dia, though, has been the standard-bearer for kuduro femenino in Angola since 2009, and Teo and Filho have to work hard to not be upstaged by her. Tshunami, meanwhile, has only been in the kuduro game since 2024, and seems mostly happy to be there. The title means “make way,” and the lyrics are in the grand tradition of musical boasts of prowess and status.

6. Jéssica Pitbull, “Waú”

(Prod. DJ Kalisboy) • Angola

The first challenger to Note e Dia’s supremacy as a cis female kuduro star was Jéssica Pitbull in 2017. From my extreme distance, it seems that Noite e Dia (whose name means night and day) still reigns supreme among the hardcore kuduro crowd, while Jéssica has managed to become more of a general pop star in Angola, although she still primarily makes kuduro. She’s been integrating the funk clave more and more into her sound, and this hard-banging fillip about the giant ass she’s recently acquired (“waú” is just a regional spelling of a particularly impressed “wow”) is a representative sample, although Kalisboy’s mix is particularly potent this time around.

7. Titica ft. Mozany Bué de Ahh & D'Benilson, “Tranca”

(Prod. Mauro Dix DJ) • Angola

The “cis” qualifier was necessary because the actually greatest female kuduro star, who long ago eclipsed both Noite and Jéssica (but who deigned to appear in the video for “Waú” lipsyncing to the lyrics) on both the national and international stages, is Titica, the daughter of Congolese refugees who began her transition in 2009. Now almost forty, this is her fourteenth straight year producing unrivaled bangers in every genre imaginable, and she shows no signs of slowing down. Mozany Bué de Ahh, whose verse is mostly gibberish spat as quickly as possible, and D’Benilson, who outraps him while making sense, are both whippersnappers whose careers postdate COVID — meanwhile, Titica’s final verse is a spray of syllables landing blink-and-you-miss-em punchlines which prove her still the queen.

8. C4 Pedro, “Sem Querer”

(Prod. BLSProd) • Portugal (Angola)

But the biggest Angolan star of the 21st century is almost certainly C4 Pedro, born in Luanda but raised in the European Union (initially Belgium), which gave him the networking contacts necessary for a really strong commercial career. He was a pioneer in adapting T-Pain’s electro-soul formula to Lusophone genres like kizomba and coladeira, collaborated with artists from all over the African continent, and after a relatively fallow period in the early 2020s has recently launched a comeback with a rootsier sound. This ode to the ego-destroying effects of ganja, with a video that prominently features both the Angolan and the Rastafarian flags, is set to an afrobeats lilt that proves an excellent bed for floaty dub elements. His voice, no longer flattened by AutoTune, has the grain of age, and he’s letting the gray show in his beard. I don’t stan men in music — they are none of them to be trusted — but few age with such grace.

9. Magda Mendes, “Tem Vida Aqui”

(Prod. Leriggo) • Angola

The Chasing Dreams production house has launched at least one great Angolan artist — Chelsea Dinorath, whose 2025 was pretty light as far as videos went — and they’re working on doing the same for Magda Mendes, who has a great voice, and on this showing great material, but hasn’t yet connected with a broad audience. She may be a tad tasteful for a restless younger generation — this is a don’t go chasing waterfalls song, the chorus saying in part “you have life here, and blessings too” — and the airy, respectable lift of the music may recall gospel as much as afrobeats or kizomba, but it’s the only song in this list I could reliably hum if I hadn’t heard any of them for a week, which counts for a lot in my book.

10. Nayela, “Melanina”

(Prod. Nosa Apollo) • Portugal (Angola)

In the inverse of C4 Pedro, Nayela was born in Belgium but moved back to Luanda with her family as a teenager. Her early demos landed her on The Voice Angola, and she’s been operating in Lisbon to build a music career. This avant-r&b song, with clipped, circular rhythms that come from Angolan and Cape Verdean tradition, directly addresses the experience of living as Black woman in a European country: “Querem lábios grossos e ginga mas não querem a melanina” (they want full lips and big hips but they don’t want melanin). Her Spotify bio says she’s working toward “a futuristic Angola that has been long overdue,” and regardless of whether that’s diminishing to what’s already been accomplished, hell yeah, we can always use more ambition in music.

Tomorrow: the second largest Afro-Luso nation. No, not by landmass or even by population, but by musical output per capita.

We’ve had a lot of bouyon and bouyon-related work over the course of this month already, and now we come to the epicenter of the sound. Limber up your joints, it’s time to dance.

None of the streaming services are playing nice with my attempts to embed a playlist, so in order to listen you’ll have to click through to the service of your choice:

Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal // YouTube Music

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

2025 Favorites: French Caribbean

1. HollyG ft. Theodora, “Coller la Petite”

(Prod. Mufasa) • Guadeloupe/France (Congo-Kinshasa)

“Don't be afraid, I say bouyon to the world,” sings Holly, the leader of the Guadeloupean girl group who has been at the forefront of the pop bouyon explosion in the 2020s. And the fact that Theodora traveled to Guadeloupe to pay her respects to the birthplace of the sound that made her a star, not to discount getting some quid pro quo synergy going between the listenership of bouyon insulaire and bouyon métropolitaine, makes me like her even more. You can hear the difference just in their singing styles: the direct frankness of the Caribbean attack vs. the icy remove of the Congolese-Parisian model — but the joint celebration of partying, and of sticking to your girls so the men don’t carry them off, is universal.

2. Shanika ft. Dexterman, “Miaou”

(Prod. Yvng Gucci) • Guadeloupe

Shanika has been a force in island bouyon since 2023, when her debut single “Kay Vé Yo” was a sensation so big that it even made it over to Trinidad, producing one of my favorite songs of the decade. This collaboration with a Guadeloupean dancehall journeyman is a great example of her ear for unusual textures and memorable hooks: that bubbling run of digital marimba or mbira notes makes this fairly explicit song (the chorus roughly translates to “make your pussy go meow,” the pun being exactly the same in French) stand out from the pack.

3. Miimii, “Sé Miimii”

(Prod. DJ Skycee, Fana MF Boyz) • GUadeloupe

For a while I resented this song for being the one bouyon song in 2025 embraced by English speakers, even getting pissy about a Pitchfork Tracks review. I guess I can’t fault monolinguals for preferring to understand what people are saying in songs (I’ve spent a lot of time this month trying to suss out lyrics when my own linguistic skills have fallen short), or indiepop fans for adoring the giddy bubbly electronic run in the post-chorus. So Miimii singing primarily in English with an international-friendly production is a canny pop move; and while I’m still not in love with her self-presentation (give me grown women any day), after repeated listens I reluctantly fell in love anyway. Sometimes the monolinguals get it right.

4. Fizzo, “Imposter”

(Prod. Don Carli) • Guadeloupe

But of course Guadeloupe is more than bouyon even in 2025. Fizzo is a brand new artist — this is her debut, and to date only, single — interested in exploring pan-afrodiasporic music . There are hip-hop, r&b, dancehall, afrobeats, and amapiano sounds going on here, and she sings as much in English as she does French. It’s doing respectably for an unknown trying to carve her own lane, which always gladdens my heart: numbers don’t mean anything to me in terms of quality, but the chance that I’ll get to hear more later is always good.

5. Bamby & Kerchak, “Pas Jalouse”

(Prod. Draco dans ta face, Finvy, Lijay) • French Guiana/France (Ivory Coast)

One of the few shatta superstars who isn’t from Martinique, Bamby is the queen of French Guianan dancehall. I’ve praised her many times in the past, and she had a sterling 2025, but this bouncy, humorous duet of mutual seduction with French drill rapper Kerchak, famous for never appearing without a balaclava over his face, was my favorite thing she did all year.

6. Rachelle Allison & R Dydy, “T'es Pas Là”

(Prod. Mimesis) • Guadeloupe/France (Martinique/Madagascar)

Rachelle Allison was one of the first singers I learned of when I realized it might be a good idea to look into French Caribbean music in the late 2010s, and I’ve had a loyal fondness for her ever since, even though she tends to work in an older, more staid and international modes rather than keeping up on island dance trends. This konpa with French keyboardist R Dydy is yet another song this year to echo 90s U.S. r&b in melodic structure, but the ethos of electro-konpa, that when emotions run too high for singing to communicate, the keyboard breakdown takes flight (functioning, in fact, exactly like guitar solos did in classic rock), keeps it squarely in the Caribbean tradition.

7. Stony, “Slowmo”

(Prod. Sturaro Alban, WiloWBeatz) • France (Guadeloupe)

If someone demanded tht I explain the difference between konpa and zouk, a comparison between the previous song and this one would be a good place to start. They’re both by Guadeloupean women who have spent a lot of their career in continental France, but Rachelle’s is definitely participating in the modern lineage of Haitian konpa while Stony’s song, which uses the exact same rhythm, is French Antillean zouk. The lack of a konpa keyboard breakdown is the most obvious difference, but another difference is simply attitude: konpa tends to be lush and fulsome, while zouk is a little drier and more steely. The two are, of course, closely related — zouk’s origin is in Guadeloupean and Martinican musicians imitating Haitian ones — but even after fifty years of parallel evolution they keep twining around one another. Stony has been a zouk star in France since 2011, one of a generation of modern legends who redefined the genre in the 2010s, and I’ve been listening to her since at least 2019 — even though this is the first time I’ve noticed her publicly, it’s not necessarily because it’s her best song yet. (Although it’s great, smooth and smoky at once.) I just finally have enough context to put it in.

8. Saïna Manotte, “Sasé Lanmou”

(Prod. Aztec Musique) • France (French Guiana)

Bamby may be the queen of French Guianan shatta, but there’s plenty more going on in the smallest of the Guianas (by both landmass and population). This zouk is far sparer and stiller than Stony’s above, leaving the impression that it’s more personal and less commercial. Saïna Manotte has made a name for herself as an eclectic, thoughtful Caribbean singer since 2018, and has been left out of my previous roundups largely for lack of space. But I do think I caught her at a particularly good year, as her experience has caught up to her ambition, producing a great string of singles.

9. Reo & Téhilah, “La Vie Doux”

(Prod. Dernz, Savion Beats) • Dominica

The little island nation of Dominica (pronounced Dominique-ah) is all too easy to overlook — wedged between Guadeloupe and Martinique, it’s culturally French Antillean but not politically, so its products don’t get the global airing that Paris allows, and sharing a demonym with the much more populous and culturally powerful Dominican Republic means that it’s even an also-ran in being Dominican. (The Republic of the Congo feels its pain.) But I’m glad to be able to right an injustice: bouyon, as a matter of historical fact, originated in Dominica, and was only popularized by Guadeloupe’s adoption of it. So this delightful soca-bouyon anthem — in English (or Patois) save for the title phrase, no less — by established star Reo (who we heard in a very different bouyon duet way back in the Trinidad entry) and bubbling-under starlet Téhilah is even sweeter in context. And it was already plenty sweet.

10. Sodaade, “Antillais”

(Prod. Dexme, Beegy) • Guadeloupe

We’ll close not just our French Caribbean leg but the larger Francophone one with a reverent prayer for peace, self-determination, and cultural preservation in the Antilles — I haven’t brought it up, assuming it as background knowledge, but corruption, crime, and narcotics trafficking (the islands are a busy pipeline between South American coca plantations and North American finance bros) are endemic in the French Caribbean. Plenty of urban musicians in the region adopt the aesthetics of drug kingpins or lower-level enforcers, but Sodaade striking a more earnest, elegiac tone shouldn’t be misread as sanctimony. Everyone in the music business is selling something, and heartfelt, rootsy authenticity has its market too. The rhythms here move from afrobeats to ones that reach back further than bouyon or zouk, to the traditional Afro-Antillean drumming of gwo ka, while the hymnal pace and Sodaade’s gravelly r&b singing overlay elements of gospel. The striking video was shot in the scenic, underdeveloped region of Anse-Bertrand (on the opposite end of the islands to the flashy modern capital of Basse-Terre), a popular international surfing destination. Maybe I’m just Bad Bunny-brained after February, but I can’t help hearing echoes of “DTMF” in so many different, but related, contexts. One of the final shots in the video, Sodaade holding a bunch of tropical flowers like an AK-47, will stay with me a long time.

Tomorrow: we enter the endgame. Five more days, and then the finale. Don’t tell the other languages, but Portuguese is my favorite: that’s why I’ve saved the best for last.

Like with the Dominican Republic, once I finished sorting my list of candidates there were simply too many songs in my “French Antilles” category to fit into one entry, so I’m splitting them up. Martinique has been the main locus of my listening over the years anyway, so it wasn’t difficult to give it the lion’s share of the songs.

Historically Guadeloupe has often been credited for the development and popularization of new genres of Franco-Caribbean music, but it’s so close to Martinique, both geographically and culturally, that what happens on one island is very quickly reflected on the other. But in the 2020s, it’s notable that Martinican acts gravitate towards shatta, the French Caribbean dancehall derivative sung in a mixture of English, French, and Creole, while Guadeloupean acts gravitate towards bouyon, the French Caribbean soca (and recently dembow) derivative also sung in a mixture of English, French, and Creole. The rubbery, spacious beats of shatta, popularized by superstar, immensely prolific producers like Mikado or Natoxie, has been one of the most addictive sounds in modern transatlantic urban music to me; even though I kicked off this entire month with Jamaica, it seems pretty clear to me that dancehall innovation has shifted to the Antilles since the mid-2010s.

But there’s plenty of bouyon in the list below too — it was just too popular across the Francophone world in 2025 not to turn up in a scene as closely related to Guadeloupe’s as Martinique’s is.

None of the streaming services are playing nice with my attempts to embed a playlist, so in order to listen you’ll have to click through to the service of your choice:

Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal // YouTube Music

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

2025 Favorites: Martinique

1. Mewen, “Real Don”

(Prod. Mikado) • France (Martinique)

Technichally Mewen was born in Brittany to Martinican parents, thus the parenthetical above, but her recording career has always been in Antillean music, from an early attempt at romantic zouk in the mid-2010s, to a 2020s comeback as a steely shatta diva. This song, with its big-budget video and a beat that is mostly empty space from the king of spacious shatta beats, Mikado, is regal in every sense. Her biggest hit of the 2020s still turned out to be romantic zouk — it always seem to work better from the voice of experience — but it’s typical of me that a song where she compares herself to a Mafia boss was the one that got my attention.

2. Cocotteland, “Tout Koté”

(Prod. Natoxie) • Martinique

One positive result of France’s enforced policy of laïcité (secularism) is that the French Caribbean, and especially the islands that are governed by France, have become a relative haven for queer expression within the broader Caribbean — not exactly free of the often violent homophobia that countries like Jamaica and the Dominican Republic have earned a reputation for, but at least not allowing the religious justifications for that homophobia to carry the weight of law. Cocotteland is an openly gay emcee rapping here about treating her woman right over a wicked bouyon beat. “Punani pour la vie” is quite the slogan. (And just a note that yes, laïcité is often used as a weapon to harrass and oppress the French Muslim population; but multiple things can be true at the same time.)

3. Sage FWI & LitleBoy, “Oulala”

(Prod. Natoxie) • Martinique

Natoxie, Mikado’s only real competition as a shatta beatmaker, has added a lot of bouyon to his repertoire recently. A smart move, to go where the action is — but it does leave a bit of a lopsided impression of his work in this list. This song proves that French Antillean party can be just as slack and explicit as the Jamaican equivalent — and just in case you managed to miss what LitleBoy was saying in Creole, Sage switches to English for some key lines. Even though it wasn’t a particularly big hit, it was an emblematic song for me all year, the nagging schoolyard-chant oohlala of the title ringing circles in my head.

4. Shiine & Shaydee's, “Jakadi”

(Prod. Foxii) • Martinique

There’s been a significant tradition of grown-women the-hell-with-a-man duets in French Antillean pop — the long-running “Femme Fatale” series from the MBI Fremar production house was a signature in the 2010s — but the fact that it’s shifted over from melismatic zouk into crisp, brisk shatta feels notable. Shaydee’s was one of the shatta pioneers of the late 2010s, and while Shiine (formerly 70 Shiine) only started releasing music in 2020, that’s still a long time in the fast-paced world of Caribbean dance. Together they give a demonstration of invulnerability — emotional, financial, and in the video, with the assistance of CGI, physical — although that’s still a zouk beat underneath it all, just sped up real fast.

5. Shannon, “Pomme d'Api”

(Prod. Natoxie) • Martinique

But my gold standard for shatta sicne I first learned about it in 2018 has been Shannon. (Shannon fwi — for French West Indies — on YouTube in order to distinguish herself from the “Let the Music Play” Shannon.) A dancer and choreographer before she took the mic, she exudes presence and understands how to leav space for bodies to move in her music. This reunion with Natoxie, who delivers a filthy, bassy shatta beat rather than bouyon heat, has her reciting a French nursery rhyme about apples while the video lets her and her twerking dancers loose on the streets of Paris, a symbol of the unruly periphery in the heart of the imperial core.

6. Kryssy ft. Krys, “Mister Plata”

(Prod. Skunk) • Martinique/Guadeloupe

Shannon’s one-time rival for the title of the Queen of Shatta, Kryssy has undoubtedly won in a commercial sense (as she did back in 2018: “Bad Cendrillon” was the hit that put shatta on the map), but that does mean she chases trends more. This absolutely criminal bouyon (I don’t know how else to describe the urgent spareness of the beat) in duet with longtime Guadeloupean dancehall star Krys in his 20th year as a recording artist, is so minimalist as to almost not be there at all — but Kryssy’s personality is big enough to fill up the empty spaces.

7. Maurane Voyer & Bad Bitch, “Feu”

(Prod. DJ Tutuss, Mikado) • Martinique

In a scene dominated by attitude rather than by vocal chops, Maurane Voyer is a rarity: a proper singer, trained in gospel and r&b but also capable of hanging with the hard men and bad gyals of shatta, she brings a silky accomplishment to Martinican urban music that would be much poorer without her. I can’t believe I haven’t really featured her before now, but she had a hell of a 2025, releasing two very fine, star-studded albums over the course of it — and this video was released on December 28th, becoming her biggest recent hit. Her guest Bad Bitch is one-half of Martinican shatta duo Honey Bees (the other half, Mina Crazysquad, just missed out on featuring on this list, along with about thirty other songs — I’m telling you, the Martinique bench is deep), and the fact that they’re both plus-size women singing about living a life of luxury is a heartening counternarrative in a decade increasingly defined by GLP-1 injections.

8. Maureen, “Mon C Ne T'Appartient Pas”

(Prod. Maureen, TRAXX) • Martinique

But of course the biggest shatta star in the world right now is Maureen, a petite young woman with a light voice, filthy mouth, and metric tons of promotional muscle behind her. After six years of apprenticeship (I first noticed her in 2019), her debut 2025 LP, Queen, was a bid at crossover listenership. Pitchfork reviewed it respectfully (something I couldn’t have imagined in 2019, but I guess I haven’t been banging these drums into a void), and the bulk of the songs received music videos. From the outside it doesn’t look like she’s surpassed her already existing Francophone audience yet — regional audiences can be fickle if they think you’re trying to abandon them to go global — but she produced a lot of good music in the effort. This airy mixture of bouyon and dream pop (not really, but kind of) has a title that translates to “my C doesn’t belong to you,” and your immediate guess as to what c-word she means is correct.

9. Amaëlle, “Aprézan”

(Prod. Amaëlle, DJ Charlan) • Martinique

I’ve talked a lot about post-Theodora uses of bouyon in these pages. I haven’t brought that up in this entry yet because bouyon belongs to the French Caribbean already, and it mostly hasn’t been used in Theodora’s distanced, analytical way — it’s party music, and if Caribbeans know anything it’s how to party. But Amaëlle, who was born in Martinique but studied in Montréal and has returned to the Caribbean, takes a much more Theodora approach to bouyon — or, according to the tags on the Soundcloud upload, to Dennery segment, a closely related rhythm from the island of Saint Lucia. Those tags also include #hyperpop, which makes the whole song snap into focus — the video’s blend of melancholy and joy, of estrangement and community, of English and Creole, of the local and the international is also echoed in the music. Amaëlle hasn’t yet garnered much of an audience for her thoughtful, carefully-constructed pop, but I have faith that she can follow in the footsteps of, say, Amaarae and blow all of our minds in four to six years’ time.

10. Meryl ft. Eva, “Coco Chanel”

(Prod. Josh Rosinet, DJ Tutuss, DJ Despy) • Martinique/France

I called Maureen the biggest shatta star in the world right now, but that’s only because I consider Meryl to be bigger than shatta. She’s distinguished herself in trap, dancehall, traditional hip-hop, and beyond, becoming a genuine “musique urbaine” phenomenon in Paris without ever watering down her Martinican roots. This duet with French* r&b gamine Eva is on the lighter, fizzier end of her work, a highlight from her enormously successful 2025 album La Dame. Meryl mentions “listening to Chlöe and Burna” in the middle eight, and the strategic use of U.S. and Nigerian stars as signifiers is important — although divvying it up by genre, region, language, rhythm, economic impact can tell us a lot, it’s all one music, the afrodiaspora listening to one another and being pushed to greater heights in response. I fucking love this shit.

*One Algerian grandparent isn’t enough to earn a hyphen in my book, but I’m noting it for the record.

Tomorrow: the rest of the French Caribbean! After which we must regretfully bid adieu to la belle langue française, and give a wide-smiling olá to a bela língua portuguesa.

Obviously, the vast and varied musical traditions of Cuba, Jamaica, Trinidan, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the French Antilles and beyond are valuable and important — less obviously, but equally truly, they were all shaped in one way or another by contact with the first free Black state in the western Hemisphere, even when that contact predated Haiti’s freedom.

Laborers from the then-French colony of Saint-Domingue imported into the Oriente province of then-Spanish colony Cuba were influential in the development of the basic clave system underlying nearly all modern Latin American (and a host of modern African) rhythms. The trend would continue, as Haitian migrant laborers spread throughout the Caribbean over the next few centuries, bringing their music with them — and then returned, infusing the motherland with the innovations of everywhere else — so that we have Haitian kontradans and Cuban danzón, Haitian méringue and Dominican merengue, Haitian compas and Martinican zouk, Haitian cadence and Guadeloupean bouyon, Haitian rabòday and Brazilian funk, and even now, as we’ve already seen, electronic konpa is spreading widely across the Afrodiaspora.

But fascinating as the view from ten thousand feet is, the immediate friction of what pop performers are doing in a given year is always going to be more scattershot and heterogenous than any theory; I don’t think that the list of ten songs below is necessarily on the cutting edge of global music production (although I wouldn’t rule it out either), but rather just participants in a global musical economy, and a relatively small, underfunded, and frequently overlooked part of that economy to boot.

Although there is a significant U.S. population of Haitian immigrants and descendants of Haitian immigrants (as we noticed in the US/UK entry), which does help with visibility. And of course the broad interconnectedness of the high-resolution streaming era has given more hopeful artists than ever before in history the opportunity to throw stuff out there and see if it finds an audience.

I didn’t start getting into Haitian pop until the very late 2010s, and I haven’t ventured much further into it than the broadly popular konpa scene yet, but it’s become very important to me in that time. I hope I can communicate some of that to you below.

None of the streaming services are playing nice with my attempts to embed a playlist, so in order to listen you’ll have to click through to the service of your choice:

Apple Music // Spotify* // Tidal // YouTube Music

(*Note that Spotify is missing one song in the US, although it may be available elsewhere in the world.)

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

2025 Favorites: Haiti

1. Darline Desca, “Beni”

(Prod. Jean Haspil Ulysse, Roody Beautre) • Haiti

Darline Desca, possessor of one of the great voices of the contemporary Afrodiaspora, first came to international attention at the age of 26, when her secular reggae hymn “Pa Lage” (don’t give up) became a symbol of mourning and resilience following the devastation of the 2010 earthquake. (I didn’t notice her until 2020, just for the record.) Fifteen years later, one of Haiti’s acknowledged musical queens, she released another hymn, this one a quite explicit Christian prayer of blessing upon her haters and enemies (following Luke 6:27) — but in the wake of Hurricane Melissa last October, Haitians have been filling up the YouTube comments redirecting the focus of the titular “beni” (blessing) onto Haiti itself. Like a lot of Darline’s latter-day work, it’s a blend of konpa and African dance rhythms, but it seems she will never escape being a locus of Haitian grief and hope for a better world.

2. JeeJee, “N'egal”

(Prod. El Magico) • Haiti

JeeJee is a member of a post-Desca wave of Haitian singers who, like Darline, have been looking Africawards (and further afield still) for sonic inspiration. There’s a konpa beat at the bottom of El Magico’s production, but it’s got a lot of Afropop signifiers, including some adorable synth lines, layered on top of it, a beautiful pop confection that gives a whimsical edge to JeeJee’s lyrics about not being a big enough person to forgive betrayal. She’s not a superstar in Haiti — although the well-done video could have fooled me — but a big personality and willingness to be unrestrained lyrically count for a lot.

3. DS Ayiti, “Gason Kolokent”

(Prod. Adams Beat) • USA (Haiti)

There’s not a lot of information about Haitian rapper DS Ayiti that I can find online; her earliest upload appears to have been in 2018, but the bulk of her work has been released in the last year — and while her YouTube channel’s location is set to “Dominican Republic,” this video was shot in Miami and her social media seems to locate her there as well. She’s getting miniscule streams either way, which I don’t think songs like this, with a springy afrobeats bed and a catchy string of boasts in Kréol with a bit of English thrown in, deserve.

4. Danaée, “Jwet Sa Danjere”

(Prod. Michael Benjamin) • USA (Haiti)

Danaée is another Haitian in the US making music aimed at Kréyol speakers to little notice, although being based in New York rather than Miami (and her YouTube bio including “podcaster” and “content creator”) differentiates her quite a bit. This big, horny blast of delight and tredpidation over a hot man making her go all weak in the knees feels like a bit of a throwback — the beat is pretty much reggaeton rather than konpa — but I’m a sucker for a big old chorus that essentially translates to Ralph Wiggum giggling “I’m in danger!”

5. Tracy Magic Girls, “E Moun Ou”

(Prod. Adams Beat) • USA (Haiti)

I’ve lucked into paying attention to ambitious Haitian urban star Tracy Magic Girls since her debut solo single in 2018, and been rewarded with an increasingly up-leveled career, which has included relocating to Miami (I note that she shares a beatmaker here with DS Ayiti) and incorporating a wide variety of Afrodiasporic music into her repertoire. This amapiano, in which she raps cuttingly about claiming a lover from another woman — refrain “è moun ou” means “is he your man” — is another in a string of tough-girl bangers she’s put out this decade. I respect her game, even when it doesn’t make me want to dance this hard.

6. Tafa Mi-Soleil, “Roots”

(Prod. AndyBeatz) • Haiti

Unlike Tracy, who is aiming for social-media populism, Tafa Mi-Soleil is the kind of singer who gets respectful coverage in English-language publications: she foregrounds an embrace of Haitian traditional music, particularly voudun drumming and a folkloric approach to melody, even while electronic konpa patterns buzz away underneath her sorrowful vocalizing. “Roots” is explicitly about that embrace — the YouTube video includes the parenthetical “(Rasin),” a Haitian genre developed in the world-music 1980s as an explicit response to reggae and other global roots genres. I admire Tafa more than I love her work, I think — there’s a bit of anthropological distance, despite the visceral videography here, that reminds me, even apart from the English word of the title, that this isn’t really music directed at Haitians, but at having Haitian art be recognized by the world. A noble endeavor! But not quite my ministry.

7. Djouly Best & Mada Mada, “Poko Wèl”

(Prod. Badio the Maker) • Haiti

Now this is more my speed. A sizeable hit thanks to virality-friendly hooks and airy synth figures, it’s a trap/rabòday duet between two newer staples of the Port-au-Prince urban scene who both debuted in 2023. Mada Mada is the bigger name (the man always is, it seems), but Djouly holds her own, and the “poko wèl” chorus (tr. I haven’t seen it) is the kind of thing that just begs to get stuck in your head, like an “It Wasn’t Me” for a generation that is simultanously more cynical and more earnest.

8. Yani Martelly, Florence El Luche, Isemylee & Tonymix, “Voye Dlo”

(Prod. Colmix, Yani Martelly) • Haiti/US (Haiti)

The Haitian pop scene getting big enough for a cynical, colorful, splashy party anthem with a crew of recognizable names was one of my delights of the year. We met Florence El Luche back in the US/UK entry, but the marquee names here are Yani Martelly, son of electronic konpa pioneer (and later President of Haiti) Michel Martelly, and Tonymix, a vastly popular DJ and singer since 2010 who has taken credit for popularizing the urban, hip-hop-influenced genre of rabòday. Which leaves Isemylee, who has been releasing music since 2019 but seems to have leveled up in the last couple of years and really made me notice her in 2025. Konpa being treated with exactly the same kind of sexy, fizzy tropical energy as Colombian reggaeton, Brazilian pop-funk, or Cape Verdean coladeira isn’t necessarily good for konpa as a serious, authentic musical tradition, but — so long as it’s a hit — it’s great for getting a pop scene to have money poured into it. And luckily, it is a hit.

9. Sarodj & Jean Marc, “Ou Pakapab (Remix)”

(Prod. Jay Elite) • Dominican Republic (Haiti)

The island of Hispaniola, divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, is riven by distrust, wealth inequality, colorism, and longstanding political resentments, but it’s true anyway that both halves have had major cultural impacts on one another (no matter how much some Dominicans would like to deny it). I’ve been following Haitian pop princess Sarodj for half a decade; she started out more or less trying to gatecrash Dominican dembow, and while she had some success there, I’ve loved her more as she’s embraced her Haitian roots (although I did note that it coincided with Haitian pop gaining commercial steam), starting to sing in Kréyol as often as she did in Spanish, and 2025 was maybe my favorite year of her career yet in purely musical terms. This remix of her dembow song “Ou Pakapab” (you can’t) featuring fellow light-skinned Haitian-gone-Dominican Jean Marc Bertin is a demonstration that Kréyol can work across genres and that dembow can work across languages — as another Haitian once said, no fighting.

10. Kanis, Danola & ElleVi, “Gadem”

(Prod. Kanis, Oscar Fortuin) • US (Haiti)/Haiti

Kanis has been on my radar as long as Sarodj, and it’s worth thinking about why so many of the Haitian artists I gravitated toward early on were not working in the Haitian market — Kanis is based in New York, and approaches Haitian music with a very internationalist lens, rapping as well as singing. Of course, as I always say, I’m very much an internationalist myself, and I’ve admired so much of Kanis’ output over the years that it was almost a fait accompli that this threeway with fellow US-based singer ElleVi and rootsy Haitian singer Danola would make my list. But the percussive gasping, the sheer melodicism, and some of Kanis’ career best bars in Kréyol made it not just an obvious pick but a necessary one. Danola and ElleVi both appear on Kanis 2025 album Ego (although “Gadem” doesn’t), and I need to listen to it now.

Tomorrow, we head southwest toward the Lesser Antilles, and to one island in particular that seems to claim the lion’s share of my French-Caribbean attention every year.

I’ve long had a kind of blind spot when it comes to Senegalese music in the present tense: I’ve listened to a bunch of it — once I got serious about listening to Francophone African pop, Senegal just naturally populated the algorithmic recommendations — but it very rarely felt like it was part of the same conversation I thought I was hearing between the Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, the Congos, and the diaspora in France. The busy, even frantic rhythms of Senegalese mbalax could feel cluttered to an ear trained on the languor of afrobeats, the slam of coupé-décalé, or the sparkle of zouk, and the influence of the griot tradition in the region sometimes left the vocals sounding less “Western,” to a mind attuned to transatlanticism, than I was used to. I always felt like I was listening to something older and more authentic (that constantly-shifting target) than the gleefully artificial pleasures of modern pop that I wanted.

I don’t know exactly what shifted in my head in 2025 to allow me to accept Senegal (as well as a bunch of other far-flung territories previously (or even currently) occuped by France) into my mental model. Maybe it was just the power of these specific songs; possibly I had simply become accustomed to its sounds. And deciding to write about 350 songs, instead of my usual 50, meant that music that would never have made it through initial rounds of cuts just on unfamiliarity alone could get more chances.

But anyway, here you are. Five songs from Senegal, one each from its near neighbors Guinea and Burkina Faso, two from Madagascar way over on the other side of the continent, and one from a tiny island in between Madagascar and the mainland. Far from scraping the bottom of the barrel, I feel I’m only just breaking ground. There are more than a dozen at least nominally Francophone sub-Saharan African nations I haven’t touched (Mauritania, Mali, Chad, Niger, Central African Republic, Comoros, Mauritius). But attention has its limits.

None of the streaming services are playing nice with my attempts to embed a playlist, so in order to listen you’ll have to click through to the service of your choice:

Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal // YouTube Music

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

2025 Favorites: Senegal et Autres

1. Ndiolé Tall, “Nema Diamant Noir”

(Prod. PapelayeBeats) • Senegal

We begin with some familiar sounds. Ndiolé Tall began her music career in April of 2025 with this song, a loving self-description (Diamant Noir, black diamond, is a nickname she has adopted on social media platforms) set to throbbing afrohouse, although complex mbalax percussion makes it into the mix toward the end. Her deep voice, authoritatively rapping — or toasting, or griot calling — in the verses is a striking sound, and if it’s a particularly internationalist sound, well I’m a particularly internationalist listener.

2. Cheikh Ibra Fam, “Xam Xam”

(Prod. Hakim Abdulsamad) • Senegal

I said above that I was all about gleefully artificial pop over the authentic expression of traditional roots music, and here I am listing a song by a former member of the classic Orchestra Baobab singing in heartbreaking griot tones to the eternal sound of the kora. It gets worse: it’s an inspirational song about the importance of education to the young, not even a little bit sexy or salacious. But somehow this is pop too: Cheikh Ibra’s falsetto croon is as strong as any pop star’s, and his percussive use of Wolof is very much part of a post-rap world. Even if it is tasteful “world music,” that beat is kizomba, part of the global urban Latin continuum.

3. Mya Blacky, “100 Francs”

(Prod. El Maestro) • Senegal

Like Ndiolé Tall, Mya Blacky is also a relative newcomer; this is her second single, and she’s also blending mbalax with a modern global sound, in this case trap, although the signature busy sounds of mbalax percussion are more to the forefront here. Her relatively staid singing in a vernacular blend of French and Wolof is subtly addicting — although I can only vaguely hazard a guess as to the meaning of the lyrics, from the sound of things she’s not very happy with what her money gets her.

4. Dialébène, “Sport Wala BBL”

(Prod. Mckaly) • Senegal

Dialébène bills herself as a comedian as well as a singer, and is parlaying viral success on short-form video social media into a burgeoning music career. She’s also clearly paying attention to the music world beyond Senegal’s borders: on TikTok she lists her genres as “mbalax afro dancehall électro pop,” and while the music here is kind of a brooding stomp-chant livened by mbalax drumming, the video is broad comedy about exaggerated anatomical surgeries, with Dialébène’s own slender frame presented as more desirable. Body politics aside, she’s a dynamic young performer I’m interested to see more from.

5. Miss Fany, “Pool Party”

(Prod. Keshflows) • Mayotte

The outre-mer French departments in the Indian Ocean, Réunion and Mayotte, are pretty easy to ignore in sheer population terms, both comfortably under a million inhabitants, and until now I haven’t heard anything musically from them that didn’t sound like a watered-down version of work being done better elsewhere in the Afro-Francophone world. (Although I guarantee I’ve missed a ton.) This bouncy, breezy dancehall number isn’t breaking any new ground either, but I appreciate that it’s not just imitating French Antillean dancehall, and has its own particular vibe. Miss Fany seems intent on being Mayotte’s first international pop ambassador, and on this showing she’s putting a good foot forward.

6. Ans-T Crazy, “Tonato”

(Prod. Saga on the Beat) • Guinea

I’ve been listening to music from Equatorial Guinea and Guinea-Bissau for years in the interest of having a comprehensive understanding of Spanish and Portuguese African music, but Guinea proper has only rarely made its way across my ears, and generally only in intense ballad form. When Ans-T Crazy filtered through several rounds of listening despite the handicaps of being a) a man and b) not immediately placeable (just from listening I would have expected him to be Ivorian), I was surprised to learn that he would be the first representative from Guinea in any of my lists: but this high-energy coupé-décalé, with its colorful video, doesn’t exactly disprove his claim on streaming platforms to be “the most creative artist in Guinea.”

7. Nabashu, “Pile Face”

(Prod. El Maestro) • Senegal

And a quick jaunt back to Senegal for one of the best rapping clinics we’ve had all month; the percussive qualities of Wolof seem tailor-made for dense flows in much the same way that Arabic or Mongolian are, and it’s only my limited attention that made me miss it before. Nabashu is an ambitious young Senegalese performer (don’t be led astray by the fact that the video was shot in Benin) who does not yet seem to have found much of an audience; she shares that with Mya Blacky above, in addition to the beatmaker El Maestro.

8. Tence Mena, “Immortel”

(Prod. Dcee Beatz) • Madagascar

If I’ve been circling warily around Senegal for years, the island nation of Madagascar has been even more of a baffling blank spot for me: although the uptempo dance genre of salegy shares characteristics with modern Francophone African dance musics (mbalax, coupé-décalé, ndombolo), it’s developed in ways unique to Madagascar, one of the least Francophone of the former French colonies. Tence Mena has been a star in her home country since 2010, when she was considered the Malagasy Rihanna, and late though it is I’m grateful to have met her now. “Immortel” was the first video uploaded on her YouTube channel Lady Boss Production — the fact that it took fifteen years for her to consolidate her online video presence is another indication of how distant Malagasy music has been from international industry norms — and at nearly six minutes long, it’s a monster workout by the standards of this list, which I can’t help feeling is only fair given how much I’ve missed.

9. Stella Lyncha, “C'est Pas la Fin du Monde”

(Prod. Raitra Sound) • Madagascar

Meanwhile, Stella Lyncha is a brand-new Malagasy artist who seems to have debuted in 2025, but has shot up in popularity anyway; this song has over 2 million views on YouTube (compare to Tence Mena’s 145K), which may partly be explained by its international-friendly atmosphere, being largely in French with an airy funk clave, inviting the broader Francophone world to delight in it. The title sentiment — it’s not the end of the world — is of course extremely useful in times like these as well, textually encouragement after a bad breakup but with broader applicability. Dance the pain away.

10. Hakhwa, “Klaxonner”

(Prod. Bebi Phillip) • Burkina Faso

And back to West Africa one last time. Burkina Faso has been overlooked almost as a matter of course by modern pop pickers — internal struggles, high militarization levels, and relatively low economic development for the region have given its pop scene little oxygen. But this fierce debut song by a Burkinabè diva declares that there’s talent and to spare in Ouagadougou. Sung in English and French with local vocabulary, it’s a hyped-up song of the self that moves between big bombastic internationalist pop in the verses and chorus and a striking middle eight with traditional Burkinabe instrumentation and rhythmic switch-ups that keep the intensity going. It’s one of the songs from this month that gets stuck in my head with extreme frequency, almost any time I hear a car horn now. Laisse les jaloux klaxonner (let the jealous ones honk).

Tomorow we head back across the Atlantic to the French Caribbean. First stop: the oldest Black republic in the world.

Partly that’s because my attention goes primarily toward internationalist pop, and the extensive Congolese pop scene headquartered in Kinshasa, with outposts in Paris and elsewhere, is relatively insulated from the violence, famine, displacement, and poverty centered in the northeast of the country. There are undoubtedly musicians making relevant music about or in response to the horrors and abuses that are happening — but just as in the U.S. the most visible pop music is not directly addressing the spread of fascism, in the DRC (as everywhere) the kind of music that gets multinationals to spend money on videos is either more universal in its expression of joy, dance, and love or more individual in its expression of heartbreak, pride, and anger.

The DRC is the fourth-largest African nation by population, behind only Nigeria in the nations on my radar. (#2 and #3, Egypt and Ethiopia, are world-historically important but I only have so much attention to give.) This means that it is, inevitably, a major center for musical creation, innovation, and iteration, the largest and most dominant Francophone music scene on the continent — in addition to the fact that the conflicts and failures of earlier generations have led to a large Congolese diaspora making a significant impact, as we’ve already seen, on France’s urban music scene.

With all of that, the Republic of the Congo, the much smaller nation to the west (Congo-Brazzaville in daily shorthand) can all too often get lost in Congo-Kinshasa’s shadow. And indeed only two Brazza songs made this list — which is much better than a strictly accurate proportion by population would make it. They’re good! But so are all the rest. Hear for yourself:

None of the streaming services are playing nice with my attempts to embed a playlist, so in order to listen you’ll have to click through to the service of your choice:

Apple Music* // Spotify* // Tidal* // YouTube Music

(*Note that Apple, Spotify & Tidal are all missing one song: the first.)

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

2025 Favorites: Congo

1. Nelly M, “C’ Mon Gars”

(Prod. Violence Musik) • Congo-Brazzaville

Apologies to anyone who automatically clicks through to one of the streaming services to listen along to the list, as on most platforms you’ll be starting with the one below this one. Nelly M (also known as Maman Nationale, thanks to a string of viral short-form skits) is a singer and comedian primarily active on social media; both she and her indie label Violence Musik ignore the streaming services in favor of YouTube, Facebook, and the like (although she seems to have recently been kicked off Instagram and TikTok). “C’[est] Mon Gars” (he’s my man) is a throbbing coupé-piano that can be taken either as a straight-faced statement of trust in her man’s faithfulness or as a lampooning of the same; either way she gets paid.

2. Bizzy ft. Innoss'B, “Angelina”

(Prod. MorVolume) • France (Congo-Kinshasa)/Congo-Kinshasa

Congolese music tends to be dominated at the top by soukous men who were already established before the turn of the millennium: Koffi Olomide, Werrason, Ferré Gola, Fally Ipupa. One of the younger figures to have made inroads, Innoss’B, isn’t yet thirty but has still been performing for more than twenty years. This easygoing duet with relative newcomer Bizzy was a big hit for him but only a moderate one by Innoss’B standards, although under pop precedent it being a love song addressed to a named woman should give it a long afterlife.

3. Gloria Bash, “Fond de teint”

(Prod. Vicmas Beatz, Young Bouba) • Congo-Kinshasa

Although I’ve been taking about the Kinshasa pop scene here, it of course does not represent the entirety of the DRC’s musical output. Gloria Bash is a young hopeful pop star based in the city of Goma, on the eastern border with Rwanda, and her music incorporates East African sounds as much as traditional Congolese ones. “Fond de teint” (foundation) takes a chilled-out approach to soukous rhythms, but her slangy, multilingual lyrics call out an unscrupulous lover in a soothing, caressing tone.

4. Kami Leonne, “Velvet”

(Prod. Salz) • USA (Congo-Kinshasa)

Although she’s been based in Los Angeles since she began releasing music, Kami Leonne foregrounds her Congolese identity in her online bios. Calling herself the “queen of AfroSilk,” she blends African musical textures with r&b in a compelling if not as original as marketed way, and sings in Enlgish, French, Spanish and more. “Velvet” sounds a lot like the title suggests: luxuruous, soft, and subtly textured. We can always use more music inspired by Sade.

5. Keurma, “Vraie Momie”

(Prod. NJ, Yesallah) • Congo-Kinshasa

It was perhaps inevitable that the music being made in France by Congolese immigrants would have an impact on the music being made by French speakers in the Congo. This is another post-Theodora song (and YouTube commenters are throwing around comparisons to Ice Spice), but Keurma, who emerged from the “musique urbaine congolaise” scene in Kinshasa, doesn’t need the permission of the imperial core to develop her own combination of trap, bouyon, and queer feminist partying.

6. Rebo, “Shoko Shoko”

(Prod. Binetou Sylla, Mobeti Beats) • Congo-Kinshasa

I’ve been sort of desultorily following her for a while, but I was surprised to realize in 2025 that Rebo has consolidated her position as my favorite Congolese performer. Like most of my faves, her career dates from the late 2010s, and she has a catholic approach to genre — this is an electronic ndombolo with amapiano bass, but I also considered the gorgeous zouk “Antidote” — and she foregrounds a delightfully weird personality, as in this video, which has her boxing goats in Joker makeup. She’s also one of the biggest young female stars in the DRC, so I get to see more of her than I otherwise might, which is a bonus.

7. PSon, “Sukali”

(Prod. Arsonne Khalifa) • Congo-Kinshasa

Pson is under the Innoss’B tier in terms of successful Congolese musicians, but he’s not doing too badly for himself, with a silky voice that incorporates a broad range of African pop — even, as in this song, Afrodiasporic pop. A Brazilian funk clave is in the mix of this sexy urban soukous, and it sounds perfectly natural.

8. Gino J ft. Ntaba 2 London, “Ambiance”

(Prod. Christbnd) • UK (Congo-Kinshasa)/France (Congo-Kinshasa)

This song could have slotted into two different prior entries, as Gino J is a British singer of Congolese descent and Ntaba 2 London is a Congolese singer active in Paris (although as you might guess from the name she crosses the Channel sometimes), Here they share an appreciation of sexy women in English, French and Lingala to a hopped-up soukous that could have been made right at home in Kinshasa, but it’s a global sound now too.

9. Mélissa Yansané, “Quality”

(Prod. AZNVR) • Congo-Kinshasa

A third AZNVR production has hit the Jonathan Bogart 2025 Favorites lists. (Previously, Aya Nakamura, Emma’a.) I hope this is more a of reflection on the breadth of his range than the narrowness of mine, athough the fact that both Aya and Mélissa are singing over a konpa rhythm doesn’t look good for me. But Mélissa’s is less Haitian and closer to zouk, with high-pitched synth wiggles decorating the edges of the beat rather than crashing in to take an emotional solo. The beach-shot video gestures more toward the Caribbean than to the Congo, but of course the DRC is too enormous to not have world-class beaches too.

10. Keys Roxsane, “Agatchu”

(Prod. ILF A La Prod) • France (Congo-Brazzaville)

Like I said, I hope to figure out a way to listen to more artists from the Republic of the Congo without neglecting all the other places I’m trying to keep tabs on. Until then, this joyful little piece of zouk&b, with a stylish video shot in the columns of the Axe Majeur overlooking Paris, will have to stand in for more.

Tomorrow: we double back towards West Africa, but cast our net more widely still: the Indian Ocean is not safe from inspection.

Cameroon is unique among the big three, because although its most recent colonial history was as a French possession, since independence it has been legislatively bilingual, with both French and English as official languages and a hybrid creole, Camfranglais, in use as a lingua franca in urban centers as well as in popular music. So although I lump it in with the Francophone countries (and indeed only a handful of Cameroon’s departments are majority-Anglophone, notably those nearest Nigeria), plenty of its music is at least partly in English.

Gabon, meanwhile, nestled between Cameroon and the Republic of the Congo, with Equatorial Guinea carved out of its northwest, is 80% Francophone, which is a notably high rate of colonial language adoption on the continent. But unlike Côte d’Ivoire (zouglou, coupé-décalé), Cameroon (makossa, bikutsi), or the DR Congo (soukous, ndombolo), Gabon does not have a signature popular dance-music tradition that has spread across the continent, and its pop scene is largely imitative of those of larger, wealthier, music-exporting nations. Which is no doubt exactly what attracts me to it — internationalist pop is naturally more legible to me as an outsider than highly local music expressing local concerns and requiring local context.

None of the streaming services are playing nice with my attempts to embed a playlist, so in order to listen you’ll have to click through to the service of your choice:

Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal // YouTube Music

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

2025 Favorites: Cameroon/Gabon

1. Genty Manga, “Je Suis Belle”

(Prod. Duperal) • Cameroon

I can’t find any confirmation that Genty Manga is related to Bébé Manga, the great makossa singer of the 1970s and 80s, although it’s notable that the latter heads the former’s list of influences, and the name is likely to be an homage. “Je Suis Belle” (I am beautiful) is her debut (and to date only) single, the kind of secular hymn of self-love and pride (in this case, in her in natural hair, African heritage, and femininity, all things that are often denigrated) that can do very well if it finds the right audience. I’m not sure it has yet, but it’s certainly promising enough to make me want to hear more.

2. Krys M, “Le Temps”

(Prod. Teddybeatz) • Cameroon

Cameroon being near neighbors with the biggest nation in African pop means that especially over the last decade, its pop scene can be thought of as having been pulled into Lagos’ orbit. This big dramatic song with amapiano bass and snatches in English reminds me of some of Tiwa Savage’s more portentous work — but Krys M is her own performer, a veteran of the Cameroonian pop scene since 2013, when she made her debut as part of forgotten girl group Mo Girls. She went solo in 2016, and has aged into a very successful 2020s.

3. Mea, “Tout Donné”

(Prod. Eric Benquet) • Gabon

Another debut single — my algorithm really wanted to make sure I was keeping abreast of certain developments, I guess — although Mea has released several more since this came out last August. She has a strong point of view and benefits from a detailed, thoughtful production here; and it helps that she’s on a big multinational Francophone African label, Eben Entertainment, which I had supposed was no more after it failed to meet the afrobeats wave in the early 2020s. The song gestures toward existentialism in its portrait of post-breakup despair, but it can’t help communicating more flavor thanks to a youthful African esprit.

4. Wendy Naya, “Drill Makossa”

(Prod. Andjamy) • Cameroon

Of course the title hooked me, with its promise of competing Black rhythms — but while I definitely hear the makossa, I’m not sure the drill comes through in any but an attitudinal sense. (Despite living in Chicago, I’m no expert.) Regardless, it’s a highlight of young Wendy Naya’s 2025 EP Wendy vs. Naya; she’s still a relative unknown, with only three years of releases, but I like her confidence, her ability to switch between voices, and her willingness to go after a novelty-hungry audience like me.

5. Mink's ft. Blanche Bailly, “Chargé”

(Prod. Smash Lazer, Daniel Wifi Beats) • Cameroon

One commenter on the YouTube video notes, “mink’s a chanté, blanche baily [sic] a rappé… incroyable 😂” (Mink’s sang, Blanche Bailly rapped… incredible). That reversal of expectation is exactly what put a summit like this between two of Cameroon’s biggest superstars onto this list, when I’ve politely listened to and largely ignored both of them in years past. Blanche is an incredible visual provocateur, but I’ve rarely connected to her music, which trends to feisty ballads; and Mink’s has been one of the key figures of Cameroonian rap for a decade, which means that unless he’s collaborating with a woman I barely pay attention to him. But this slamming coupé-décalé (or one of its derivations, I fully admit I can’t keep up here) about taking charge, keeping the phone charged, paying with a charge card, etc. is a great showcase for his throaty singing and her authoritative character work.

6. Feeligram, “Nouvelle Cité”

(Prod. Matt Esdras Beatz) • Gabon

I said above that Gabon didn’t have its own urban dance music that it could export and relied on imports. That’s not entirely true in the mid-2020s: tcham, ntcham, tcham tcham, or afro-tcham (different artists use slightly different variants) is a breakout underground movement in Libreville, recently adopted by high-profile rappers like L’Oiseau Rare, which combines classic hip-hop sounds with modern throbbing bass and traditional African percussion elements. For my money, the mercurial, gonzo, and very young Feeligram is tcham’s key representative: I get the same sense of moral vertigo from the video for “Nouvelle Cité” that I did back in the Odd Future days, or even from early Eminem.

7. Créol ft. Mimie, “Bouge de Là”

(Prod. Brillian Ngwayi Ngaa) • Gabon/Cameroon

As I’ve noted on numerous occasions, Créol is by far my favorite Gabonese performer and one of my all-time favorite African performers: her blend of dancehall with afropop is more or less single-handedly responsible for me getting into Francophone African pop at all. I’ve also enjoyed Mimie, a Cameroonian dancehall singer and Créol’s exact contemporary, for almost as long. This meeting of the dancehall minds is maybe not quite as explosive as you might want from two major figures, but it’s solid, and Créol in particular rattles off her syllables with machine-gun precision.

8. Sabrina, “Faraway”

(Prod. Sparrq) • Cameroon

Sometimes being pulled into the Lagos orbit pays off. Sabrina is Cameroonian but clearly aiming at the Nigerian market, and she has a bona fide hit with this song, at least on YouTube, where it’s at 30 million views and climbing. Is some of that arguments in the comments about the largely AI-generated visuals? Sure; but the song is well-constructed, catchy, and stands perfectly well on its own, a blend of afrobeats and sophistipop that makes it possible for me to overlook the sickly smooth visual textures. (For the record, Sabrina’s recording career long predates AI-generated music, and I have no reason to believe the sounds are ersatz. But the technology’s impact on trust matters.)

9. Ishikawa, “Sommet”

(Prod. Nova Beats) • Gabon

It’s an exciting time to be paying close attention to a number of African scenes. Ishikawa (Claude Henriette Nyingone) debuted in the summer of 2025, releasing a series of self-penned songs with brooding textures, immaculate visuals, and convincing melodies. “Sommet,” from December, was my favorite, but check out “Solo” and “Miroir” too, and I’m looking forward to “Kolo” once I finish these posts and am allowed to listen to 2026. Technically this would be categorized merely as trap, but the aching strings and Ishikawa’s steel-in-velvet voice give it an air of grandeur belied by the beats. Looking forward to following a new young auteur.

10. Emma'a ft. Chily, “C'est mon BB”

(Prod. AZNVR) • Gabon/France (Congo-Kinshasa)

Meanwhile, I’ve been following Emma’a for years although I don’t believe I’ve ever written about her before, as her usual metier is heartbroken ballads — immaculately orchestrated and richly sung heartbroken ballads, but further afield from the rhythmic pop I’m typically listening for than I often want to go. But this airy soukous in duet with Congolese-French r&b loverman Chily (and produced by AZNVR, who was at the boards for Aya Nakamura yesterday) gets the hips moving, which helps me appreciate her personality all the better.

Tomorrow: we cross the Congo watershed and make our way into the heart of the continent.

This first entry covers the Francophone countries that touch the Atlantic Ocean via the Gulf of Guinea west of Nigeria. I’ve titled it Ivory Coast, after the largest and wealthiest of those nations, Côte d’Ivoire, but it also includes the slender strips of Togo and Benin — but not Guinea itself, which is saved for a later entry.

The coupé-décalé scene centered in Abidjan, which is roughly analogous to Angolan kuduro, Brazilian funk, or Dominican dembow in its speed and force of attack, is less well-represented in this list than you might expect, not (just) because it’s historically been dominated by men, but because my passive French isn’t good enough to reliably distinguish between uptempo bangers on the basis of their subject matter. Of the four European languages I consider myself capable of listening to music in with any degree of comprehension, French is my worst (English: mother tongue, Spanish: immersive study as a tween, Portuguese: learned in adulthood but with a head start thanks to Spanish, French: haven’t formally studied at all, just a year or two on Duolingo), and of course the further away from standard Parisian French you get the more lost I’ll be.

But of course, as you’ll have heard, the number of French speakers on the African continent far outstrips the number of French speakers in Europe, so who’s really setting the standard?

None of the streaming services are playing nice with my attempts to embed a playlist, so in order to listen you’ll have to click through to the service of your choice:

Apple Music // Spotify* // Tidal // YouTube Music

(*Note that Spotify is missing one song.)

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

2025 Favorites: Ivory Coast

1. Denden, “Padtal”

(Prod. Davy One) • France (Ivory Coast)

Technically we’re still in France with this song, just at the departure gate. This is very much post-Theodora pop urbaine, and not just because of the clipped bouyon rhythm: Denden, born in Abidjan, sings in dialog, first giving voice to her haters (“regarde la Denden elle fait du sale” = look at Denden, she’s inappropriate) before quite literally clapping back (“danser, danser, danser, ils ont pas d'tal” = dance, dance, dance, they don’t have the skills). The bubbly, fast-paced production is over almost before it began: naturally, it was huge on TikTok.

2. Yilim ft. Didi B, “Déja Gâté”

(Prod. Dafe) • Ivory Coast

For our first Ivorian production proper, we have a summit between two survivors of the Ivorian pop scene. Yilim was one-half of pop-décalé duo Nafasi back in the 2010s, and Didi B gained fame as the frontman of Kiff No Beat, a popular hip-hop/coupé-décalé crew active since 2010. This duet, however, takes an airy afrobeats as the setting for a song about accepting never being able to please the haters.

3. Josey, “Focus”

(Prod. Schama Production) • Ivory Coast

Josey, with her deep, flexible voice and signature diastemic smile, has been one of the foremost female stars in Côte d’Ivoire for a solid decade, with a wide-ranging catalog that tends to circle back to (originally Congolese) soukous, as this song — a third straight dismissal of haters, this time because she’s too focused on her own success to pay them any mind — demonstrates. The soukous guitar and rhythmic clip provide counterpoint to a soulful vocal performance with little left to prove.

4. King Baba ft. Ayanne, “Salam aLeykoum”

(Prod. KBC, Momo Beatz) • Senegal/Ivory Coast

Senegalese rapper King Baba, who is on streaming services under the name Ngaaka Blindé, first released this song on a 2024 album, but the May 2025 video release is what I count. The title is one French spelling of the traditional Arabic greeting nowadays rendered in English as “salam alaykum” (ٱلسَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ), and while musically it’s not particularly arabesque — amapiano bass, afrobeats drum fills, synth flute, and highlife guitar patterns dominate the mix — it’s good to remember that Africa is not exclusively dominated by one Abrahamic religion. Ayanne, whose participation was what brought me here, is an Ivorian r&b star who sings primarily in Pidgin English here.

5. Vitale ft. Grand Homme & Me Ji La Fifa, “La Jolie Moto de Papa”

(Prod. Hermann Aristide Djedji) • Ivory Coast

One of the few female stars of coupé-décalé, Vitale (“la patronne,” as she calls herself here, the boss) has also been at it for a decade, with a string of hits (including a collaboration with Josey that was very big in 2025 but felt a little unfocused for my purposes). I’m not sure if this song about a motorcycle is in reference to the tragic 2019 motorcycle accident that killed DJ Arafat, now considered the patron saint of coupé-décalé, but its compulsive danceableness, Vitale’s unflagging energy, and the hype dance video make it fun regardless.

6. Les Tchoutchas ft. Team 2 Poy, “Enjaillement Tchoutchas”

(Prod. Ben à la prod) • Ivory Coast

Coupé-décalé, like every other genre, is subject to the whims of social media these days. Les Tchoutchas is a group of Ivorian beauty and comedy influencers who got together to produce some silly chantalong music and have been memed into having an actual career. This is their third single, the premise of which is that they’ve been sent to prison for being too sexy; they’re joined by comedy-décalé duo Team 2 Poy, who have paved the way as memesters. None of which would matter at all if the beat didn’t go hard, but it does.

7. Queen Myriana, “Pas de Debat”

(Prod. Ali Asgar) • Ivory Coast

Remember, every African nation has a dancehall scene. Queen Myriana is one of Côte d’Ivoire’s reigning dancehall toasters, with a style entirely distinct from the French Antillean shatta scene where the most widely-disseminated Francophone dancehall is created. “Pas de debat” means “no debate,” of course, but the ratatat chorus turn the syllables into percussive blasts, while the djembe outro contributes to the year’s vague gesturing toward Middle Eastern sounds.

8. DRE-A ft. Fanicko, “Pas Toucher”

(Prod. Emercyr) • Ivory Coast/Benin

Probably my favorite Ivorian performer of the last several years is Dre-A, a skilled young rapper whose intelligent, feminism-adjacent music has won my heart several times in these lists. She had a great 2025 (see also the showstopping “Intro” and bi-curious trap-décalé “Girlie”), but my favorite song by far was this funk-and-bouyon snapback at the grown men sliding into her DMs. “Tu peux just regardar mais pas toucher” goes the chorus (you can only look, but don’t touch). Beninese soulboy Fanicko willingly plays the part of the louche horndog chatting her up, but Dre-A’s supreme self-confidence wins the day.

9. Voilà Lulu, “Djohodo”

(Prod. Producer X) • Benin

I’ve invested significant hours into trying to get a grasp on Ivorian music, but I can’t say the same for Benin or Togo, where I’m at the mercy of what the algorithm decides is close enough to what I’ve already liked. Voilà Lulu makes music that fits right in with international alt-pop trends, so much so that I had to double-check several times that she is actually based in Benin. (As far as I can tell, yes!) This is a floaty bit of plaintive, get-you-out-of-my-head disco, with traditional shaker percussion melting away for a four-on-the-floor in the chorus. But she’s charming as all hell, and that melodic sense is to die for.

10. Blackt Igwe, “Personne N'est Personne”

(Prod. eric yaw otu) • Togo (Ghana)

Apologies to Togo that their one representative in this list was in fact born in Ghana, although he’s been based in Lomé for over twenty years. I hadn’t heard of him before this floated into my recommendations, but its vivid combination of amapiano bass and fiddle hook (yes, it’s most likely a DAW patch) caught my attention, and his thesis, a very African “nobody is more special than another” (per the video description), is inventively and strikingly communicated. Humility in a pop star — now I’ve seen everything.

Tomorrow we follow the Gulf of Guinea to the east in order to check in on the crook of the African elbow. Cameroon and Gabon fans, get hype.

If I cared primarily about logical consistency, I wouldn’t have done that; but I’m chasing after a vibe, not logic, and although plenty of non-Black French people can and do produce excellent music, even excellent music in the genres and scenes I’m most interested in, they are for the most part surplus to my requirements. I often say that my areas of interest are African, Latin and Caribbean music — Latin, in this context, meaning Latin American with some grace extended to the Iberian peninsula. But France, despite its historical lingustic connections, falls under the “African” umbrella, and specifically sub-Saharan Africa. (Had I but world enough and time, luxuriating in the splendors of French Maghrabi pop would be a tempting use of both; but I deliberately limit my attention because I am all too aware that I have neither.) Oh, and “France” itself is an elastic term — none happen to appear in the list below, but a Francophone Belgian or Swiss performer of African descent would certainly be qualified.

A note on my annotations. I’ve been using parentheses to denote either the ancestry or the birthplace of the main performers in each song, with unparenthesized countries as their current base of operations (so far as I can tell). But since every single perfomer below has parentheticals, I want to be clear that I do not consider them any less French because of it. In fact, the whole reason this list exists is because France is a hotbed of African music, and the vast bulk of that music is made by French-born people, whether descended immediately or remotely from Africans, but they’re all French. At the same time, however, I do distinguish between France l’Hexagone and its overseas departments, particularly in the Caribbean, both because I support independence and self-determination for all peoples and because musically the cultures are as different as those between Jamaica and the UK or between Cuba and Spain. By a strictly legal definition France (Martinique/Guadeloupe) just means France (France/France), but culture matters more than le Loi in these parts.

None of the streaming services are playing nice with my attempts to embed a playlist, so in order to listen you’ll have to click through to the service of your choice:

Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal // YouTube Music

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

2025 Favorites: Afro France

1. Aya Nakamura & Joé Dwèt Filé, “Baddies”

(Prod. AZNVR, Joé Dwèt Filé) • France (Mali/Haiti)

We’ll start with the biggest Francophone star of the decade, a statueseque Malian-born singer who adopted her stage name from the American superhero show Heroes. She’s been a regular feature at the top of the French charts since 2018 and is the most popular female Francophone singer in the world, having dethroned Céline Dion a number of years ago. This song is a victory lap, but a well-earned one, and bringing Haitian-born crooner Joé Dwèt Filé on as backup for a song based on the Haitian kompa rhythm is a still-rare case of a woman being in a position to do a very popular man a favor in global urban pop.

2. Fallon ft. Ronisia, “Fake Woman (Et alors?)”

(Prod. Joeemb, Phantom.YTN, Raydaprince) • France (Guadeloupe/Martinique/Cape Verde)

Fans of Fallon, a Parisian whose parents hail from the French Caribbean, are quick to point out that she, not Theodora (see below) was the first to introduce the Guadeloupean bouyon rhythm to Parisian pop urbaine. History is written by the victors, of course; but Fallon can take solace in the fact that this pop-bouyon song about taking vengeful joy in being despised for her enhancements and vibrantly colored hair has also become quite popular in the wake of Theodora’s success. Ronisia, a long-serving pop urbaine starlet with roots in Cape Verde, plays the supportive friend role, but it’s very much Fallon’s show.

3. Yena Blue, “Cardio”

(Prod. Lijay) • France (Gabon)

Of course, not everything is about the numbers. Yena Blue, active in France but happily claimed by Gabonese fan sites, has been active since 2019 without making much headway in terms of listenership. But she makes skillful, sensual music blending several strains of Black Francophone culture: this, for example, has a zouk/kompa beat but a shatta (Martinican dancehall) bounce, courtesy of the Antillean producer LiJay, while her perfomance is a masterclass in ultra-composed Parisian cool. She’s recently wiped her TikTok, announcing that she’s quitting music due to the French industry’s toll on her mental health, but it may well be a publicity gambit to get attention on a “final” song (Joé Dwèt Filé is in her comments hyping her up). Either way, she’s produced some solid music in recent years, which is nothing to be ashamed of.

4. Kany, “Délice”

(Prod. Le White) • France (Martinique/Mali/Ivory Coast)

But back to big pop urbaine stars. Kany has roots in the Caribbean and across Africa, which is another way of saying that she’s Parisian in the 2020s. Like “Baddies” above, it’s a French take on konpa with a big call-and-response vocal chorus, but Kany deliberately positions herself a few notches down the socioeconomic scale from Aya Nakamura, a working-class striver whose “papi chulo” is going to take her out of all this as opposed to Aya’s 1% hedonist being the godmother handing out favors.

5. Gaëlle, “Je t'avais dit”

(Prod. LZ, Shesko L'Émeraude) • France (Congo-Kinshasa/Angola)

This song embraces one of the key sounds of modern French pop urbaine, identified by legendary Congolese musician Ferre Golo as “rumba trap,” a combination of Southern U.S. trap and Congolese soukous, itself a 20th-century offshoot of Cuban son (marketed as rumba). Gaëlle has Congolese and Angolan roots, and her viral 2023 hit “Chou Daddy” at the age of 17 leaned heavily on Congolese rhythms and a naïve performance of sexuality that is, sigh, very popular in France. Two years later, rumba trap is the sound of her maturation: “Je t’avais dit” means “I already told you,” and she’s demanding respect from rather than simpering for a man. (Of course it’s nowhere near as big a hit.)

6. Maud Elka, “Nanani”

(Prod. AZNVR, John Scorp) • France (Congo-Kinshasa)

A significant proportion of Afro-French people were born in or are the children of people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for reasons that a basic grasp of modern world history should make obvious. Maud Elka, who has been a star since 2020, is of Congolese descent, but her light, effervescent music is deeply Afro-Parisian, which is to say a blend of continental African and Caribbean rhythms — I believe the rhythm here derives from soukous, but it’s in an airy zouk manner.

7. Tayc, “Ma Lady”

(Prod. Akatche, MKL) • France (Cameroon)

The token male in my list this time around is Tayc, whose urgent, velvet-smooth vocal style is one of the signature sounds of modern French pop. This fillip of electro-makossa in honor of a new love was only a minor hit by Tayc’s standards (a mere seven-figure viewcount), but would be an enormous success for most of the artists I cover.

8. Affa, “Diva”

(Prod. Dogzout) • France (Senegal)

I’ve been really taken with the work of Affa, an alt-r&b singer with an assured sense of style whose songs rarely break the two-minute mark and who shot a beautiful video for nearly every song on her 10-song debut album, which runs all of 17 minutes. “Diva” is not obviously better than the rest of her catalog, but I was charmed the most by the ways it recalls the era of new jack swing without actually recreating the characteristic sound.

9. Ebony, “Rage”

(Prod. Joa, web7) • France (Guadeloupe/Martinique)

It’s not a one-to-one comparison, but Ebony Cham reminds me a bit of Willow Smith — both daughters of famous 90s musicians, both prepared to follow their uncompromising muse in uncomfortable and off-putting directions, both getting plenty of acclaim for it if not world-shaking success. Ebony’s father Thierry Cham was a superstar of 1990s zouk, which her confrontational, dramatic, industrial-electronic backing here has nothing in common with — at least until the final post-chorus, which kicks into a classic 1980s disco-zouk rhythm before the adieu.

10. Theodora ft. Guy2Bezbar, “Pay!”

(Prod. Jeez Suave, Junior Alaprod, Zafy) • France (Congo-Kinshasa)

In case you’ve been living under a rock, Theodora’s “Kongolese Sous BBL” (#7 on my 2024 list) was an enormous French hit, catapulting her into the upper echelon of stardom without having to water down her fundamental weirdness in any way, but granting her a bigger canvas on which to paint. This duet with fellow Franco-Congolese artist Guy2Bezbar was only one of several follow-ups to prove that she didn’t need the bouyon rhythm to be successful, it just worked out that way: the YouTube video description for “Pay!” calls the song’s genre “tou-rou tou-rou tou-tou” after the nonverbal vocalization she does.

Having assessed the Afro-French scene, it’s time to head south and begin to investigate the French African scenes. First stop: le Côte d’Ivoire.

As a European colonial power, Spain is also home to a growing immigrant population, if one that is less visible than in France, Portugal or the UK. Equatorial Guinea, the only former Spanish colony on the African mainland, does provide a small (though, as we’ll see, important) number of immigrants, but the bulk of them come from Latin Americans looking for more opportunity and from Europeans looking for more affordable lifestyles. Only a handful of the artists I’ve chosen in the list below have extensive roots in Spain; which is more about the established paths my curiosity takes me down than any reflection on the typical musical output of Spain, which has just as broad and diverse a musical scene as any Western European nation’s.

Equatorial Guinea, one of the smallest African nations, does have its own tiny music industry, although musically it’s just as influenced by its African neighbors (and the unbroken musical traditions of the peoples who have always lived there) as it is by European or Latin American pop. And Equatorial Guinean musicians interested in international exposure frequently leave the country for better-resourced pastures, whether locally or in Europe.

If this feels like more of a grab-bag of songs that have little to do with each other than some of the other lists in this series, that’s because it kind of is: I’m not trying to faithfully present a complete picture of Spanish urbano or of Equatorial Guinean music, just collecting a few of the highlights that have come across my ears and eyes. But the songs are good, even if they don’t have much to say to each other.

None of the streaming services are playing nice with my attempts to embed a playlist, so in order to listen you’ll have to click through to the service of your choice:

Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal // YouTube Music

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

2025 Favorites: Spain/Equatorial Guinea

1. Aleesha & Delgao, “Mi Cuuulo”

(Prod. Bexnil) • Spain (Uk/Indonesia)/Spain

The baile funk clave is everywhere in 2025. This is the kind of horny/cool/blown-out Spanish urbano that would have used a reggaeton rhythm any year prior, but since Brazilian funk goes harder, it’s the new hotness. Aleesha, born and raised in Ibiza, is the daughter of a British mother and an Indonesian father, and began her career singing in English in imitation of American r&b stars, but she’s moved on to ultra-hip indie urbano. This breezy, ass-focused duet with Delgao, a graduate of the boy band Go Roneo, is a great introduction.

2. Aret, “Sin Boxeo”

(Prod. Carli Nistal) • Spain (Colombia)

It’s pretty arbitrary that I put one Colombian resident in Europe in the South American list and I’m putting another here; but everything about this project is arbitrary. But this is a very Spanish production, constructed in Carli Nistal’s Cantabrian studio, with rhythms drawing from afrobeats but organized in a very Europop way, hinging on dramatic crescendos rather than any specific groove. Which fits thematically: she’s landing punches verbally in the song as much as she does physically in the video.

3. Bakale, “Mundo Contigo”

(Prod. ProdBy17) • Spain (Equatorial Guinea)

All I know for sure about Bakale is that she sings in English and Spanish, calls herself “chica de la isla” (island girl) on her YouTube profile with the Equatorial Guinean flag (the country’s second largest city and former capital, Malabo, is on the island of Bioko), and that this video was partially shot at the Plaza de España in Madrid. But that’s enough: the pan-African sound, with afrobeats rhythms, makossa guitars, synthesized strings, amapiano log drums, and her own throaty singing, is swoonworthy regardless of biography.

4. Leïti & Polimá Westcoast, “Más Alas”

(Prod. iseekarlo) • Spain (Senegal)/Chile (Angola)

Kanyean chipmunk soul productions are back! (Not keeping my ear to the rap ground, I couldn’t say with confidence that they ever went away.) This giddy celebration between Leïti, a Spanish singer of Senegalese descent, and Polimá Westcoast, a half-Angolan Chilean rapper, is a preview of the the kinds of increased hyphenization that globalization is inevitably bringing about. The Curtis Mayfield sample is a little overwhelming, but that’s the point: lavishness, success, and triumph are the primary topic for both gentlemen here.

5. Lola Índigo, “Sin Autoune”

(Prod. Andrés Torres, Mauricio Rengifo) • Spain

All right, fine, here’s a singer with long-term roots in Spain. Lola Índigo has been famous since 2018, when her debut single was an enormous hit in Spain, and she’s still one of Spain’s leading pop performers, though she’s only rarely crossed over to Latin American audiences. This is an album track about being real (“without autotune”) from her 2025 album Nave Dragón (dragon ship), with a video that shows off her impressive dance skills, but the reggaeton lope and nagging whistle hook are what kept me coming back to it.

6. Lapili, “Painkiller”

(Prod. Seysey) • Spain

Another performer with long Spanish roots (she’s from Ciudad Real, halfway between Madrid and Andalusia), Lapili is a multidisciplinary artist and dancer who has been making music since 2018, when she sampled the sound of her thighs smacking to create a reggaeton track. I’d only started noticing her in the last couple of years, though, and the run-up to her current album, Miss Fatty Fairy (in the videos for which she wears elf ears) has really impressed me. This wistful reggaeton/baile funk about dancing to ease the pain of heartbreak is a standout, but her whole intellectual, tropical-rhythmic, body-positive catalog is great.

7. Suzete, “Sal y Agua Bendita”

(Prod. Ariel, Migz) • Spain (São Tomé & Príncipe)

I posted a mea culpa on Bluesky last year for not including Suzete’s “Machuca” (bite) in my 2024 year-end list, and if “Sal y Agua Bendita” (salt and holy water) doesn’t quite hit the same melodic highs, it’s still a great slice of passionate Spanish afrobeats. Suzete, who grew up between Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking African islands, is one of the most remarkable young r&b singers in Spain today, and I’m now constantly awaiting her next move.

8. Paranoid 1966, “Baby IceCream”

(Prod. Unreleasedx) • Spain (Equatorial Guinea)

For the longest time, Paranoid 1966 was the only Afro-descended Spanish singer I knew of or followed, and now that she’s no longer the only one her release schedule seems to have slowed down: she only released two songs in 2025, one of her lightest years since her 2019 debut. “Baby Icecream” is vintage Victoria, mumble-yearning r&b vocals over slamming beats, and if it’s not quite as distinctive as her classic work with producer Boixy, time does its number to all of us.

9. Vanilla Karr, “Dime”

(Prod. Knii Lant3i) • Equatorial Guinea

I’ve been following one of Equatorial Guinea’s brightest female stars, Vanilla Karr, since 2018, which was two years after her debut, and it’s been wonderful to watch her mature musically over the years. This gentle amapiano-thrumming song, in which she asks a resentful lover to tell her what she’s done wrong so she can make it right, is a beautiful blend of African continental sounds and urbano melodicism — it could fit right into Colombia’s afrobeats scene, for instance. Goyo collab when?

10. Alu, “Mamiwata”

(Prod. Hary Safu, Jorge Martínez Moldes, Karl Lee Hartweger, Nil Fruitós Sanchez) • Spain (Equatorial Guinea)

Alu, from Equatorial Guinea, has the same management as Leïti above, but he has forged his own distinct identity, singing both in English and Spanish with a late-night afrobeats mood. The West African legend of the Mamiwata (which was also the title of Suzete’s 2025 album), a dangerous female water spirit, provides the key metaphor for an excellently-crafted take on the standard louche young man’s song about being captivated by a woman.

Tomorrow: we cross the Pyrenees into La Belle France. Or at least a demographic slice of her. You can probably figure out which.

You’re not wrong, assuming the above paragraph represents your thoughts. When I first started sketching out this month, I assumed that Argentina, Chile, and non-Afro Colombia would be getting their own entries, or that at the very least the Southern Cone (Argentina, Uruguay and Chile combined) would. But I eventually ran into two limitations: since I had a hard cap of thirty entries, any further division of South America would mean taking music away from elsewhere in the world, something that became harder to justify the more I tinkered; and secondly, I hadn’t actually been paying as close attention to non-Colombian South American music as I assumed I had.

Even just the other night while prepping this entry, I realized one of the songs I had down to represent Chile was in fact Mexican (it turns out the artist just got a lot of streams in Santiago) and I had to scramble among the runner-ups to find a replacement. (Shout out to Sugaarrbbaby, you would have fit right into the Mexican neoperreo groove.) The way I accumulate new music, adding algorithmic recommendations to an ever-increasing playlist with a click or two and listening through it days or weeks or months later, is a perfect method of stripping the music of any context that isn’t immediately graspable from the language or the video, and while I do check up on everything I save in order to sort it after the fact, I can, of course, make mistakes.

And the algorithm just wasn’t throwing a lot of South American artists my way. Even one of my favorite releases of the year (not represented below, but wait for the finale on the 31st), a deeply Argentinean song by a musician I’ve praised in years past, didn’t float into my attention via YouTube recommendation but from an entirely separate, now abandoned, project. I hope to tweak the algorithm this year in order to get more from (at a minumum) Buenos Aires, Santiago, Montevideo, Caracas, Lima, and Guayaquil, because I know I’ve only scratched the surface and that there are thriving (or burgeoning, depending) urbano scenes going on there. (Apologies to landlocked Bolivia and Paraguay for being such a coastal elite in this regard. Maybe someday.)

There is also probably a significant degree to which my focus on Afrodiasporic music has given short shrift to the highly Europeanized Argentine, etc. urbano scenes, and in general outside of Colombia, Spanish-speaking South America is much less Black than anywhere else I pay attention to save Mexico — but Mexico is well served by my algorithm.

But anyway, enough excuses and caveats. I hope to go deeper this year, but there was still more than enough brilliant South American music I came across in 2025 to fill this list.

None of the streaming services are playing nice with my attempts to embed a playlist, so in order to listen you’ll have to click through to the service of your choice:

Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal // YouTube Music

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

2025 Favorites: South America

1. Greeicy, “Curándote”

(Prod. Arat, Casta, Gabo) • Colombia

The late-2010s rise in Colombian pop urbano (of which Karol G is the figurehead, but which runs much deeper) has, half a dozen years later, produced a handful of reliable female stars. I don’t think I’ve ever publicly noticed Greeicy before, but I’ve enjoyed a bunch of her work over the years, both in collaboration and solo. She’s from Cali, but began her career as a teen telenovela star in Bogotá before transitioning into music in 2017, adopting the fashionable tropical reggaeton sound and becoming one of her country’s bigger female stars. Now in her thirties, she’s leaning back into her Pacífico roots: this joyous reggaeton lope includes dense electronic washes of folkloric instrumentation, with lyrics recommending communal celebration and music as salves for a wounded heart.

2. Palo, FMK & Micro TDH, “Hacela Corta Morocho (Remix)”

(Prod. Chris Anderson, John Anderson) • Argentina/Venezuela

Normally I wouldn’t glance at Argentinean reggae, for pretty much the same reasons that I would be skeptical of, say, Danish reggae — but Palo, a young reggae- and r&b-oriented singer with blue eyes and 4b hair, is a striking enough figure to have overcome my prejudices. This remix of her early-2025 song “Hacela Corta Morocho” (cut it short, dark and handsome) with fellow Argentine reggaetonero FMK and Venezuelan rapper Micro TDH is a rare example of a time when I actually prefer the remix with dudes to a woman’s solo song — Micro TDH in particular adds some vibrancy that the original lacked. And now I’m keen to see what Palo will be up to in the future.

3. Yilda Banchón ft. Andreina Bravo, “Cumbia Ligera”

(Prod. Elvis Guapulema, Miguel Angel Cano Duque) • Ecuador

I can’t claim in any real sense to have much of a grasp on Ecuador’s music scene: the bulk of what I’ve listened to has come through occasional trawls on Popnable, a very incomplete and error-prone resource. But I do those trawls because they can turn up little jewels like this one. Yilda Banchón (the one with the afro) started as a child performer on televised showcases but has been angling for a pop career since 2020. This cumbia duet with blonde starlet Andreina Bravo (who has had one significant hit) is a showcase for their light, airy voices without going very deep personality-wise. Which makes sense: the title means “light cumbia.”

4. Nisi, “Riviera”

(Prod. Nabález) • Argentina

Like Palo, Nisi is a newcomer to the Argentine pop scene who has chosen an Afrocentric lane — in Nisi’s case, afrobeats. (I can’t speak to her heritage, but she seems to be modeling her approach on crossover figures like Tyla.) Like a lot of young performers these days, she started out singing covers on YouTube, and although now she has major-label backing and a strong visual identity, she hasn’t yet hit big. I don’t know that she’s quite perfected the formula she’s going for — this summertime reverie, combining afrobeats, soukous, and Spanish pop, is good, not lifechanging — but I’m intrigued enough to keep following.

5. Nicole Favre, “Ella”

(Prod. Suena Tribu) • Peru

I am equally as ignorant of Peru’s broader music scene as I am of Ecuador’s, but my YouTube algorithm seems to know that I like queer Latin pop, so this light, fizzy pop-house ode to giddy mutual girl crushes with Spanish guitar filigree made it into my rotation. It wouldn’t normally have stuck around — I’m enough of a snob about tropical rhythms that the rather basic pop backing track felt a little weaksauce — but the chorus kept getting stuck in my head when I saw the title, which is a real feat for such a basic word (it means “she”). And ultimately I felt it was better to have something cute and catchy from Peru than nothing at all.

6. Mari La Carajita, “Marik Ya!”

(Prod. Mari, Mazzarri) • Venezuela

I’ve felt for a while now that Venezuela is a big missing piece from my musical map, and while I don’t really think I filled it in in 2025 I’ve made more progress than in years past. For what it’s worth, commenters on Venezuelan music videos seem to agree that their urbano scene, give or take a few international stars like Danny Ocean, is comparatively lacking, hyping up any promising newcomer as the great veneco hope. In the case of Mari La Carajita, they just might be right: a virtuoso instrumentalist and excellent live singer who combines Venezuelan folk traditions with urbano modernity in a very 2020s (even a very 2025) way, she’s a genuine talent who, rarely, even seems to have things to say. This high-attitude chant is an encouragement not to contact a toxic ex, but the folkloric ryhthms give it an almost spiritual significance.

7. Soulfía, “Na de Na”

(Prod. Alba Arias Avila, Duke) • Chile

Listing only one Chilean song would have been unimaginable to me a decade ago, when I considered Santiago’s indie dance scene to be one of the most exciting in the world, but we’ve drifted apart since then. Soulfía’s career dates from 2017, when she was a young artist trying to fuse r&b and reggaeton, but she’s gone in a slightly more industrial direction recently, as witness this gothy, vaguely kinky kiss-off to an ex trying to manipulate her to return. Spanish guitar decorations, reggaeton beats, industrial textures, and a powerful, literary voice make this an exquisite slice of indie urbano. I really need to get back into Chilean pop now.

8. La Larita, “Ke Se Repita”

(Prod. Martín Vegas) • Argentina

Argentina is one of the three biggest western-hemispherical mainland centers of urbano femenino — Mexico and Colombia being the other two — so it’s noteworthy that I’m not including any of the really big Argentine names: there’s no Cazzu, Lali, Tini, Emilia, Nicki Nicole, or María Becerra on this list. Would-be starlet Larita has a mere 21K monthly listeners on Spotify, and is the third result when you search for her name on Tidal — but this nagging singsong perreo, her voice given an unfashionable electronic sheen, still easily clears most of the big-budget productions by that list of superstars that I heard in 2025. There’s no substitute for being young and hungry.

9. La Toxi Costeña, “El Luto”

(Prod. Miguel Angel Marin Martinez) • Colombia

For years I’d been wondering why there were no women in champeta, Colombia’s classic urban coastal Caribbean music which has evolved into keeping pace with reggaeton; occasionally I’d find one or two great songs before inevitably being disappointed when they weren’t followed up. But it does look like at last there’s a champetera who’s sticking around despite the pearl-clutching of moralists and misogynists — Cindy Ávlia, who gained a social-media following as La Toxi Costeña (the toxic girl from the coast), blends champeta with neoperreo aesthetics, provocative posturing, and uncensored lyrics to solid if not wild success, and has cemented her niche in the Colombian pop ecosystem in ways no woman has managed before. This sarcastic response to an ex butthurt that she’s already over him is a classic Toxi vibe — “El Luto” means traditional black mourning attire, and she’s very clear that she’s not wearing it.

10. La Valentina, “Rebota”

(Prod. Tonio 8cho) • France (Colombia)

We’ll finish today by relocating to Europe one song early. La Valentina is a Colombian-born performer active in Paris, where she and producer/manager Tonio 8cho have been slowly rolling out an ambitious, multi-sensory Rosalía-style music career starting in 2022. “Rebota,” although it’s in Spanish, takes a very Parisian approach to a rhythm based on baile funk’s hard clave but which functions more like industrial: her insistance that “el culo rebota” (the booty bounce) ends up sounding more like a threat than an invitation. But even if hers is a more European sound than a Latin American one, La Valentina is still in conversation with the perreo of her home continent.

Tomorrow we will close out our unit on the Spanish-language music of 2025 by seeing what other sounds the Old World has to offer the New. And after that? Get ready for some Francophonie.

It’s maybe worth a graf or two unpacking why I feel the need to focus on Afro-Colombians specifically rather than Colombia as a whole, the way I’ve treated other countries. (Inb4 Europeans and Euro-brained Latines start in about US Americans being the real racists for acknowledging the intersection of phenotype difference and sociocultural status,) One big reason is that on scrolling through every “best Latin songs/albums” list I can find for 2025, I can’t help noticing that Colombia is nearly always represented by white or white-passing artists — and there’s a common, usually unstated but bone-deep assumption in Latin (and not just Latin!) music discourse that middle-class, usually white artists push music forward while lower-class Black and brown artists maintain musical traditions and occasionally produce novel sounds that can be used by the ambitious middle class to add authenticity and grit to their sophisticated internationalist art.

Contrary to which, a lot of what I think of as “my project” in pulling together all these different strains of African, Caribbean, and Latin music is to reinforce how much the Afrodiaspora is at the center, rather than the margins, of contemporary music. “Post-dancehall” (in the post-punk sense of emerging from rather than having replaced), which includes but is not limited to reggaeton, afrobeats, baile funk, and trap, is globally Black, no matter how many relatively pallid global superstars get rich off the back of it. I do want to be careful, as a white observer, to never get to the point where I’m fetishizing Blackness for its own sake — especially in the Latin world, where mestizaje is a historical reality separate from the racism that made it an ethos — but I also want to make sure that the significant contributions of Afro-Latin communities get their due, especially after decades of cultural neglect and commercial suppression. The 2020s have shaped up to be a golden age of Afro-Latin musical expression so far, and it would be foolish not to recognize that.

Anyway, about Colombia specifically. Most celebration of Afro-Colombian music has tended to focus on the Caribbean coast, the origin of cumbia, vallenato, champeta, and more — but the Pacific region, while much poorer, is also (would you believe) much more heavily populated by the descendants of enslaved Africans, and the modern musical ideas emerging from a specifically Pacífico identity have been growing in prominence over the last decade, even if they haven’t been making many waves outside of Colombia yet.

Although I’m not Colombian, and I guess these posts count as waves. Enjoy!

None of the streaming services are playing nice with my attempts to embed a playlist, so in order to listen you’ll have to click through to the service of your choice:

Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal // YouTube Music

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

2025 Favorites: Afro Colombia

1. Goyo & Zaider, “Volver a Verte”

(Prod. Golden, Slow Mike) • Colombia

The one Pacífico act that did cross over to broader Latin music audiences, at least in a minor way, was ChocQuibTown, a hip-hop trio formed in 2000, who incorporated a broad palette of sounds, both distinctively Colombian and from the broader Latin and Caribbean musical world, into a steadfastly Afrocentric blend rather than stick too closely to the U.S. model of rap. They split up in 2023, when Goyo, their charismatic and seemingly ageless female lead singer, went solo (although Slow Mike, another member of the trio and her brother, remains her main producer). Her 2025 album Pantera was one of my favorites of the year, and this track off the album with young champeta star Zaider (who was two years old when ChocQuibTown started!), a lush afrobeats about missing a lover when they’re not there — although the video broadens the sentiment out to familial love and loss — has brought me to tears on multiple occasions, including while writing this.

2. Jhosy, “Obvio”

(Prod. Joe on the Beat) • Colombia

Young liquid-voiced singer Jhosy is from Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast, and is part of a wave of younger Colombians fusing Caribbean rhythms like champeta and reggaeton with afrobeats. His performance of gender would trigger transvestigation in the Anglosphere, but he wields his soft, high voice effectively, slipping between afrobeats, reggaeton, and loverboy r&b so skilfully that he’s got a rapidly growing, passionate fanbase eager to see him explode. He’s appeared on some high-profile remixes, but his solo material is still underheard. “Obvio” (obvious) is short but sweet, heartbroken teenpop with a mercurial rhythmic focus.

3. William Chocó & Luis Eduardo Acústico, “Pesca Milagrosa”

(Prod. Joser Fyu, Yao Beat) • Colombia

The 2019 creation of ritmo exótico in Quibdó, the largest city in the Pacific department of Choco (and from which ChocQuibTown took its name) is still reverberating in 2025. As here: the longtime face of ritmo exótico, Luis Eduardo Acústico, joins with William Chocó, a rising star on the scene for a duet about an untrustworthy woman, using the Gospel story of the miraculous draught of fish as a reference for her catfishing: but the main focus od the song is (as it should be) squarely on the rhythm.

4. Alex Purry & Queen's Tafari, “Ven Ven”

(Prod. Dee Master) • Colombia

If you’ve followed me at all for the past several years you have most likely noticed that I’m a hopeless fan of Queen’s Tafari, an Afro-Colombian dancehall sister act with far more talent than listenership. This collaboration with Alex Purry, who has been in Colombian rap crews since 2007 and went solo in 2014, is little more than a showcase for their toasting skills over a riddim that goes hard, but to be fair they’re some really good toasting skills and a fantastic riddim.

5. Nailú, “Casa Sola”

(Prod. Dimelo Nando) • Colombia

This was Nailú’s first single (she’s only put out a second so far in 2026), but she was a known quantity, having appeared on the Colombian X Factor in 2022 and having won a more local competition in her hometown of Cali. A witchy diva with a distinctive look and a rich voice, she tries to have it all ways on this song, which promises partying (she has the house to herself!) but evolves into some more cosmic meanderings as the rhythms switch up between afrobeats, reggae, afrohouse, and folkloric sounds. A promising beginning, although I’d like to see more editing.

6. Junior Zamora, “Sagitario”

(Prod. The Colombians) • Colombia

I can only feel I’ve been asleep at the wheel for most of the decade because I only caught up to Junior Zamora in 2025. One of the leaders of a dynamic and restless Colombian r&b scene based in Cali, the Pacific region’s largest city, he’s as much a visual stylist as a musical one, and prolific, having released two albums, six EPs, and dozens of singles since 2019. (My favorite of the pre-2025 work I’ve sampled was “Pa’ las Joyas”, a celebration of queer Afro-Latin identity with Brazilian rapper MC Dricka.) His 2025 release schedule was relatively quiet thanks to major touring commitments in support of his 2024 albun Joyas del Barrio. But the EP Un Verano en Caliyork (yes, Bad Bunny casts a long shadow) saw him experiment with adding afrobeats into his sensual, often slow-paced r&b haze, from which this was only a small highlight: which doesn’t mean it’s mediocre, just that the rest of the EP is as good.

7. Analú, “No Coja Lucha”

(Prod. Juan Carlos Mindinero) • Colombia

Salsa choke arose about a decade prior to ritmo exótico in Tumaco, on the southern end of Colombia’s Pacific coast. Either an urbanization of salsa with reggaeton and hip-hop elements or an outgrowth of reggaeton and hip-hop played with salsa instrumentation, depending on how traditionalist your definitions are, it’s maintained a steady presence in Colombia music ever since. Analú is a young rapper and singer from Tumaco: here she blends salsa choke with electronic guaracha to rap about street tough attitudes in a video showcasing her hometown.

8. Verito Asprilla, “Malo H”

(Prod. Cankita, Cerrero, DJ ZAa) • Colombia

A second young female rapper from Tumaco has hit the playlist. “Malo H” is a Colombian take on dembow (with a BPM somwhere in between Dominican dembow and traditional reggaeton), flipping an expression coined by Colombian TikToker Leandro Santos (“malo h” = “malo hablar” = “bad talk” = “don’t gossip”) into a girl-power banger, casually outdoing his self-aggrandizing meme song of the same name in both flow and beat, though not yet in listenership. It was the advance single for her 2026 debut album, which is going in my queue now.

9. Robe L Ninho, “Flow Cabrón”

(Prod. Robe L Ninho, Prieto Riddiman) • Colombia (Cuba)

Robe L Ninho is the stage name of Roberto Álvarez, a Cuban Afrocentric rapper, idealist, and hairstylist who splits his time these days between Havana and Cali, Colombia, where he runs a salon specializing in Black hairstyles. This song, co-produced with a Colombian DJ with a video shot in Cali, combines martial rhythms with amapiano bass and salsa horns for an explosion of Afro-Latin pride and righteous attitude. The video goes even more in depth on Black fashion history and political rhetoric, but the song is great on its own too, reminding me of Kanye’s ambition fifteen or so years ago.

10. Jossman, Canalón de Timbiquí & Nidia Góngora, “Corréte”

(Prod. Jossman) • Colombia

It’s kind of fascinating to go through Jossman’s discography and realize he was kind of an Usher wannabe when he started in the early 2010s; it wasn’t really until 2020, on a collaboration with Slow Mike of ChocQuibTown, that he found his groove as a relaxed, hoarse-voiced ambassador for Pacífico culture, blending reggae, hip-hop and afrobeats with Colombian traditions. This is the leadoff track from his 2025 Afroking album (recommended!), with acclaimed folkloric group Canalón de Timbiquí and their former leader Nidia Góngora (who released her own great album in 2025) contributing syncretic spiritual chants to Jossman’s lyrics warding off the devil, or mala vibra (bad vibes), from communal work and play. Jossman grew up in Timbiquí, a historic Black community on the Pacific coast, so in some ways this is kind of a full circle moment. Although it’s always much shorter than I remember it being.

Tomorrow, we see what else Colombia has to offer, plus more! Stay tuned, true believers; we’re halfway through!

I lived in Guatemala from ages twelve to eighteen, which means that on some level it will always have a feeling of home to me, and that whenever it’s possible to take a rooting interest in any international competition it can qualify for, I will always cheer on Guate. My connection to the other countries of Central America is much more limited: so there’s only one Costa Rican song here and nothing from Nicaragua or El Salvador.

I should note here that Panama is often considered culturally and sometimes geographically distinct from the rest of Central America, because of its history of being part of Colombia before the United States engineered its independence in order to make a certain canal, built with the importation of Jamaican labor, happen. Those close cultural ties are one reason that reggae en español first took off among Panamanians before evolving into reggaeton in Puerto Rico barrios.

So I’ve spent more time in recent years with Panamanian urbano, because it’s been closer to the center of the Caribbean explosion, than I have with the rest of the isthmus, and that’s reflected in the numbers here. But I’m trying to make up for it now.

None of the streaming services are playing nice with my attempts to embed a playlist, so in order to listen you’ll have to click through to the service of your choice:

Apple Music* // Spotify // Tidal* // YouTube Music

(*Note that Apple and Tidal are both missing one song; amusingly, not the same one.)

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

2025 Favorites: Central America

1. Ben Carrillo, “Centroamericana”

(Prod. esoesjeff, Dave) • USA (Guatemala)

A Guatemalan rapper who moved to L.A. at fifteen to pursue his music dreams, Ben Carrillo is still working the hustle rather than having made it, but this ode to “Central American baddies” in swaggering Spanglish is a strong first impression. A classic reggaeton beat gives him space to flirt respectfully (though not prudishly) with his target audience; and the end of the video, with his cast of video vixens sitting down to eat politely after the shoot, is just adorable.

2. itZel, “No Vuelvas Más”

(Prod. Alex Orozco) • Costa Rica (Mexico)

Young would-be pop singer itZel, the daughter of a Costa Rican mother and a Mexican father who she lost to COVID in 2021, is so brand-new to the scene that this is only her third release, but this is exceptionally strong teenpop, with an afro-Latin percussion line and some delicious swooping strings. Lyrically it’s a standard kiss-off to a boy who won’t stop bothering her, enhanced by a girl-power video and some impressive choreography for a novice’s budget.

3. Las Catrachas & KBP El Alien, “Pum Pum Short”

(Prod. Alemvn) • Honduras

Honduran raspe — punta dancehall — has been brewing for over a decade on the northern coast among the Garifuna communities who have strong ties to the rest of the Afro Caribbean, but it’s emerged as its own full-fledged genre in recent years, with its stars and even its own manufactured girl groups. Las Catrachas are primarily a dance crew, but they had a pan-Latin hit with “Rica y Apretadita,” sung by Kiria Rubio, in 2024, and were on a world tour on the strength of it for much of 2025, but they still managed to squeeze in new material. Here, Alline Fonseca, their new singer after Kiria Rubio went solo, duets with genial toaster KBP El Alien on the eternal theme of booty shorts (and also miniskirts) over a laid-back raspe beat.

4. Karol Wilson, “Bailando”

(Prod. Pedro Sanjur) • Panama

Karol Wilson, who trained as an architect, painter and actor, is probably best known in Panama now for being on the third season of Elegidos por Su Chispa, a musical talent discovery and development show produced by a beer company for Panamanian TV and social media. This, her first single after winning that season, is her best yet: an airy, joyous afrobeats that segues into congo, the traditional dance music of settlements founded by self-liberated Afro-Panamanians during the transatlantic slave trade.

5. Tayl G, “Tra”

(Prod. Eypi Vibez) • Guatemala

I wrote about this song on Bluesky back in October, when doing a countdown of my 50 favorite songs of the 2020s so far that I would be unlikely to count down in exactly the same way today. So without repeating myself too much: I love Guatemala’s Caribbean coast, I love Tayl G, who is from there, and I love pretty much any reggaeton song that takes Don Chezina’s 1998 classic “Tra Tra Tra” out for a spin. Sometimes it doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that.

6. Carlienis, “Ciudad de Dios”

(Prod. Da Silva) • Panama

I’m a little mad that i didn’t really notice Carlienis until 2025 — she’s an exact contemporary of Elisama, a Panamanian singer and toaster I’ve loved since 2019 (but whose one headlining song with a video this year wasn’t quite distinctive enough to make this list), but I do believe I caught up to her with her best song yet, at least since parting with producer El Codigo Kirkao in 2019. I’ve admired Da Silva’s production with Panamanian rapper Italian Somali, and his beat here is a tuff dancehall track that gives Carlienis a lot of room to boast about her lower-class roots, tease a sugary chorus, and dominate a flow switch-up. It hasn’t been a hit (her recent only work with any traction is collaborations with male rappers), but it’s an artistic triumph.

7. Charan ft. Milagro Flores, “Quema (Taki Taki)”

(Prod. Habla Jey) • Honduras

Although raspe has been blowing up in Honduras, traditional punta — or at least the commercial expression of punta mixed with reggae and rock that originated in the late 70s, fueled a worldwide hit in “Sopa de Caracol”, and has continued to develop in the post-dancehall era — is still extremely popular there too. Young singer Charan, working under the aegis of the Honduran “Música Pal Barrio” production collective, anchors this fast-paced, joyous punta, with contributions from influencer and TV host Milagro Flores. I don’t often get giddy about these songs, but this one is just plain fun!

8. Jr Clark, “Señor Oficial”

(Prod. Alemvn, Arm, Eduk Beatz) • Honduras

Jr Clark runs in the same circles as Las Catrachas and KPB El Alien above — he’s on the remix to “Pum Pum Short,” and its producer is on this track — but he might just be the young face of raspe in 2025, able to convincingly communicate in international dancehall, hip-hop, and reggaeton as well as local punta idioms. The beat here goes very hard, with a wonderful flanged synth towards the end that ties it in to old-school funk as well. Solid, unpretentious work that’s helping to make him a star.

9. Alexa Kayl, “La Madrina”

(Prod. Krizmar) • Panama

Alexa Kayl is a contemporary of Karol Wilson above, but their career paths are very different: Alexa’s attempt in 2025 to incorporate Panamanian congo into her gleefully vulgarist urbano (which, full disclosure, I considered for this list) was met with online outrage over sexualizing an UNESCO-protected world heritage culture without participating in it. This flinty amapiano, with a video shot in New York City, casts her in a less equivocal light as the wealthy, amorally ruthless “godmother” of the title, willing to trample on anyone to get ahead. It wouldn’t work if she didn’t have the charisma to back it up, but she does.

10. Demphra, “Como Se Olvida”

(Prod. Rike Music) • Panama (Dominican Republic)

Because I was not paying close attention to Latin music in the 2000s (more fool me), La Factoria, the great hitmaking Panamanian reggae en español crew active 2001-2013, passed me by. Demphra (born in the Dominican Republic but raised and operating in Panama all her life) had been the last member standing in La Factoria by the end, and her solo output has been at best intermittent since. But she seems to have gotten a new lease on life in 2025, and her EP Imparable had her tackling sharp modern reggaeton in addition to Mexican banda and, here, cumbia, all ornamented by the late Panamanian guitarrist Alejandro Dubarran. I focus on youth a lot in these lists, but there’s no substitute for hard-won age and experience.

Tomorrow we cross the Darien Gap into South America, but we’re going to tarry a while in Colombia, and even in a specific, often-overlooked Colombian demographic. I can’t wait!

In the aftermath of the Benito Bowl, I saw Mexican TikTokers ruminating on whether Mexico had a comparable figure that could bring the entire continent to a standstill in a similar way, and despite some wishful thinking from commenters, regretfully concluding that no, at the moment they don’t. But even lacking a unifying giant like Bad Bunny, Mexico has a sprawling and eclectic musical middle class in a way that Puerto Rico, with its much smaller population and imperialist exigencies, cannot sustain.

Most of my picks come from that middle class, and specifically from a strain of woman-centric urbano that has developed out of what used to be called neoperreo, an explicit, abrasively digital offshoot of reggaeton that emerged in the early 2010s embraced more by theorists and sex workers (not to be redundant) than by DJs and clubbers. This OnlyFans-era update on neoperreo is both more crowdpleasing and less distinctive, since reggaeton itself has gotten filthier and more juvenile as it’s become the lingua franca of the modern Latin musical world.

Still, there are enough actual pop stars active in Mexico that, even if they haven’t crossed over to the degree that someone like Bad Bunny has, there are always plenty of bangers to be found.

None of the streaming services are playing nice with my attempts to embed a playlist, so in order to listen you’ll have to click through to the service of your choice:

Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal // YouTube Music

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

2025 Favorites: Mexico

1. Bellakath, “Sikitty”

(Prod. Legorreta) • Mexico

We’ll start with a figure I hadn’t paid much attention to before 2025, which was perhaps an error on my part. Bellakath is a famous/notorious Mexican influencer who gained an online following before launching a cartoonishly sexualized reggaeton career, going viral in 2022 and remaining highly popular ever since. This porny come-on delivered in a breathy simper would be merely tiresome if it weren’t for the trancelike rhythm of the titular chorus (tr. “yes kitty,” one of her nicknames) and the liveliness of the beat.

2. Danna Paola, “Khe Calor”

(Prod. Danna, Hoyer, Manuel Lara) • Mexico

Danna Paola came up in the industry in a much more traditional way: starting as a child actor in telenovelas, working her way up through stage performances and film roles, launching a simultaneous pop career in 2011, working with established stars and crafting a flexible but hardworking persona. Here she delivers a reggaeton-house banger with a grown woman’s sense of desire, with a lavish music video casting her as a princess in a fable, Mexican-telenovela style.

3. Asixx, “Fuego, Tussy y Ron”

(Prod. ElBunkermx) • Mexico

Both Bellakath and Danna are from (very different neighborhoods in) Mexico City, but there’s a lot going on outside that megalopolis. Asixx is a young trap performer in Mexicali, with a relatively low profile in the music industry, but she’s working roughly the same side of the street as Bellakath, only with a much lower budget. “Fuego, Tusi y Ron” (fire, tusi (a pink-dyed cocaine mixture popular in LatAm), and rum) is a naggingly funky slice of dancehally trap with several bars of a reggaeton riddim, delivered with the kind of deliberate vacancy that makes a moralist scramble for his Bible.

4. Cachirula & Loojan, “Uii”

(Prod. Fuentes Prod, Luis Diaz) • Mexico

A consistent theme in commenter reactions to Cachirula, the young woman who takes half of this horny sex-you-up duet, is that she’s real and talented, not like those fake social-media neoperreo stars like Bellakath or Yeri Mua. Wearing short hair and not flaunting enhancements counts for a lot, I guess. This is a single from her second Sexolandia album in collaboration with rapper Loojan in as many years — on which Yeri Mua also appears. (The fan beefs are fake too.)

5. Malaïka, “Empate”

(Prod. TØLEDO) • Mexico (Haiti)

Malaïka, whose roots are Mexican and Haitian, is from Guadalajara, and she might seem a bit out of place in this mostly raunchy list: although my favorite of her songs is a pissed-off mariachi, her 2025 efforts tended to teen-pop winsomeness. “Una Carta Más” is Sabrina Carpenter-style disco bliss, “Cancún” is an infectiously tourism-friendly bit of pop-reggaeton, and “Empate” is called cumbia-pop in the YouTube description, but I hear an airy afrobeats update of (brace yourself) “Fight Song.” It’s better than that sounds, I promise — the similarities are textual rather than musical, and Malaïka going to bat for feminine self-respect is a good counterweight to today’s more hedonistic entries.

6. Fuerza Regida, “Tu Sancho”

(Prod. Angel Gomez) • USA (Mexico)

One of the names put forward in TikTok comments as a potential Mexican rival to the stature of Bad Bunny was Fuerza Regida. Which, in 2025, is wishful thinking — but that’s certainly their ambition. A norteño band from San Bernardino using traditional Mexican regional instrumentation (tuba, requinto, toloche) but who write songs in trap idioms while Jesus Ortiz sings in an alt-rock rasp, they’re extremely popular in northern Mexico and the southwestern US, and this Ellie Goulding-sampling slice of posturing seduction is one of their biggest hits to date, with half a billion streams on Spotify alone. (Shout out to Nick for bringing them to my attention, since they would otherwise never have trickled into the ruts I’ve deliberately carved out for myself.)

7. Samantha Barrón, “Solo Tú”

(Prod. Saibu) • Mexico

One genre I’m always meaning to spend more time with but never seem to get around to is Mexican r&b, which has an extensive, decades old, and productive scene that has has by now differentiated itself significantly from the American tradition it began in imitation of. Samantha Barrón, of Zacatecas, is one of the leading lights of r&b mexa, with a cool, slightly fragile voice but great rhythmic resilience, comparable perhaps to an FKA Twigs but really in her own lane.

8. Charly Gynn, “Lo Rocé”

(Prod. Tzunami) • Mexico

One of the most original and interesting voices in Mexican post-neoperreo, for my money, is Charly Gynn, whose nasal voice, sing-song delivery, and hard-ass beats (like the video here) ground her hypersexual boasts in a working-class milieu. It’s notable that this song’s chorus describing a handjob is in the past tense, rather than the future: it’s not a come-on so much as it is a contractor submitting evidence of quality workmanship to a potential client.

9. Rixxia & Rivvaa, “Rokaleta!”

(Prod. Rivvaa) • Mexico (Spain)/US (Mexico)

Mexican neoperreo has significant crossover with pan-Latin hyperpop: it’s all one big internet-fueled addictive sticky-sweet goulash. Paola Riccio, who seems to have been born in Spain but works as a DJ and singer in Mexico, and Rio Huizar, a Mexico City-born producer and rapper now based in San Francisco, have collaborated on a number of tracks together (with 2024’s “U R Such a Lame!” as their biggest hit), and this hyper house song, using the Rockaleta brand of candy sucker as an obvious metaphor, is fizzy, brainless fun.

10. Sofía Reyes, Luísa Sonza & RaiNao, “MiuMiu”

(Prod. Douglas Moda, Kastelo, Majestik) • Mexico/Brazil/Puerto Rico

Like Danna Paola, Sofía Reyes is in the upper echelon of Mexican pop stars. She was signed to a label based on the strength of her YouTube covers at the age of twelve, and has been a pan-Latin star since 2018. This dark perreo, with unobtrusive baile funk woven into the mix, is less a big splashy pop summit between Mexican, Brazilian, and Puerto Rican stars than a demonstration that noirish, beat-heavy seduction works pretty much the same across the Latin continent. But that big splashy pop summit was the follow-up, this time without RaiNao.

Tomorrow: we head south through my favorite place in the world, the Central American isthmus.

Because Puerto Rico is the epicenter of global urbano. Sure, Colombia and Mexico and Argentina and Chile and Venezuela and Ecuador and the Dominican Republic and Panama and even (sigh) Spain are competing centers of gravity, but take Puerto Rico out and the whole system collapses, splintering into regional factions. But because of how small and relatively poor Puerto Rico is (even though on the music industry side it’s backed by considerable U.S. investment, that investment is often merely extractive), there’s not much of a Puerto Rican musical middle class: there are the giant world-spanning stars, and then there are a ton of people with big ambitions but limited resources trying to get any traction in a space where so much of the oxygen goes to sexy, flashy reggaetoneros performing vulnerability.

(No hate. Benito isn’t on this list, but wait till the 31st.)

So what I do end up connecting to from Puerto Rico feels even more random than usual, especially since women get even less sustained attention than men in the multiply-gatekept Puerto Rican industry than they do elsewhere in the Caribbean. But even when I have to dig for it, I do find music I love.

None of the streaming services are playing nice with my attempts to embed a playlist, so in order to listen you’ll have to click through to the service of your choice:

Apple Music // Spotify // Tidal // YouTube Music

And you can of course watch the YouTube videos which first grabbed my attention in the playlist linked below.

2025 Favorites: Puerto Rico

1. Ozuna, “Sirenita”

(Prod. Dynell, Legazzy, Yazid) • PUERTO RICO

Ozuna, of course, is one of those world-spanning sexy reggaetoneros performing vulnerability, although he’s been on a bit of a commercial downturn in the 2020s. Musically less adventurous than many of his peers, he’s stuck to relying on his pretty voice and looks as urbano has grown increasingly ambitious and politcal around him. But this fantasia on Iberoamerican mythology set to an afrobeats backing is just the kind of smooth groove I don’t mind getting caught up in.

2. Fefa Ramos, “Put It Out”

(Prod. Dimension Music, Mezzo Beats) • PUERTO RICO

By way of contrast, Ozuna has 52 million monthly listeners on Spotify; Fefa Ramos has a total of 3. True, she just started releasing music in 2025 (this is her second single), and is an independent artist with a fraction of the production value available to platinum-sellers. So the joy and excitement of “Put It Out,” an uptempo reggaeton stomper in Britney-voiced Spanglish, is even more impressive. Unfortunately, the irruption of bomba halfway through the video is not on the actual audio single, so it’s not quite as exciting as I thought; but it’s still a lot of fun.

3. Fiamma, “Pe-erre”

(Prod. Matoby) • USA (PUERTO RICO)

Partway between Ozuna and Fefa (10K monthly Spotify listeners), Fiamma is more musically adventurous than either, shifting between electronic neoperreo, bomba, and merengue in one brief two-minute song about pride in her boricua identity. The title is a transcription of “P.R.” in Spanish, but by writing it out like that she nods to perreo, the universal dance slash attitude slash habitus of reggaeton.

4. Talí, “Calor”

(Prod. Orteez) • PUERTO RICO

Although by the metrics she’s closer to Fefa (19 monthly listeners), aesthetically Talí is right up there with any of the big names in sensual, emotionally numbed perreo femenino right now; but because she’s Puerto Rican instead of Mexican or Argentine or Chilean or Colombian, there’s much less chance that she’ll get the kind of traction that can sustain even a mid-level career. This floaty, spacy reggaeton with afrobeats textures leans so far into sensual fantasia that it’s in danger of losing touch with the ground, but it just makes me want to hear more from her.

5. Bodine, “Teke”

(Prod. Blvck 95, Xay) • USA (PUERTO RICO)

Not going to keep going with the streaming numbers, but Bodine Koehler Peña, born in Amsterdam but raised in Puerto Rico, a former pageant winner and model, once more has a lower profile than she would likely have elsewhere in the Latin world. This minimalist dancefloor heater borrows sounds from baile funk, dembow, and industrial, while the video is a not entirely ironized 2020s update of every music video that has ever catered to an aerobics fetish.

6. Yneliz, “Rico”

(Prod. Futuro Clasico, Jaeux, L.A Entertainment, Triple V) • PUERTO RICO

Another underheard female Puerto Rican urbano artist: Yneliz has been posting music online for a decade, primarily singing and rapping over trap beats. Unapologetically big, queer, and independent, she’s got a miniscule audience, which means that this party come-on, as x-rated, horny and sexually assertive as any masculine counterpart’s, has a fraction of the views that it would if she were a straight man singing the same exact filthy steal-your-girl sentiments. In fact, I would likely roll my eyes at the same exact thing from a guy, but from Yneliz there’s a real sense of adventure.

7. Villano Antillano, “XXL”

(Prod. Groove 2070) • PUERTO RICO

I said in the intro that there’s not much of a musical middle class in Puerto Rico, but there is at least one figure I listen to who occupies it. Villano Antillano is a trans woman who has achieved the near-impossible feat of going semi-mainstream in Latin music, collaborating with a who’s who of figures both progressive and conventional across the Spanish-speaking world. “XXL” is an industrial rap song about wanting a big man but also about being too hot and unconventional for him to handle, which is about par for La Villana’s course.

8. RaiNao, “Sofocón”

(Prod. David B, Noize, Orteez, Wiso Rivera) • PUERTO RICO

Another middle-class figure is RaiNao (her artist name is a Hispanicization of the English “right now,” and also a sideways pun on “reina,” queen), an adventurous, fiercely auteurist alt-urbano singer-songwriter. Her 2025 Bad Bunny duet dwarfs all the rest of her output by popularity, but she deserves much more attention outside of that long shadow. This alt-pop gem, with infusions of jazz, plena, and haywire AutoTune, is a dense love song about the rush of being romanced by a more experienced lover; the video, with its more equivocal imagery, is less giddy.

9. Babywine, “Luquillo”

(Prod. DJ Nelson) • PUERTO RICO

There aren’t a lot of reliable pathways to stability, let alone popularity, for women singers in Puerto Rico, so it’s hard for me to begrudge Babywine’s career of being joined at the hip to DJ Nelson, a producer who has been at the center of reggaeton since the mid-90s. Especially when the collaboration results in such an infectiously breezy merengue as this. A long apprenticeship in rock and pop before turning to urbano in her later 20s has given her voice a pleasantly lived-in quality I really love.

10. Tanicha López, “El Que Come Callao”

(Prod. Julio Gonzalez, Harold Wendell Sanders, Erick Urbina Toranzo) • PUERTO RICO

We’ll close with this, salsa bending into Latin jazz, because of course Puerto Rico is more than just its urbano scene. Tanicha López is a veteran of a bunch of different respectable roots-music outfits over the years, with a voice that can swerve from Celia Cruz realness to Ella Fitzgerald fireworks, and this big-band guaguancó, using food as a trusty metaphor for sex, is not quite a pop move but rather an insistence that a pop audience meet her where she is. Music for parents, sure, but parents deserve to have good, sexy music too.

After four days in the Caribbean, tomorrow we set sail for the Spanish Main to spend an equal amount of time in territories and populations more than ten times the size.