Fadophonics

When listening to Slow J’s Afro Fado, it feels like he is next to you, nearly whispering as he tenderly fuses fado’s slow, finger-picked dedilhado acoustic guitar with rap flows, African polyrhythms and percussion loops. With this sonic blueprint, he carves out an unprecedented space for fado to exist in Portugal’s multicultural landscape. “I love to try and push sound forward, following some rules, breaking others,” he says with a knowing smile.

Released in 2023, Afro Fado continues to be a heavyweight title in Portuguese contemporary music – it remains one of the most-streamed Portuguese albums of recent years, with Slow J touring the album extensively around Portugal in 2025. Its title feels defiant at a time when fado feels increasingly commodified – evidenced by the host of tourist-catering fado houses dotted across Lisbon. Slow J is asserting his space and revindicating the genre’s culturally rich, layered history and ongoing relevancy.

Yet João Coelho – Slow J’s birth name – didn’t set out intentionally to flip assumptions about fado, but rather to tap into something more personal: an exploration of his mixed-race identity as the son of an Angolan father and Portuguese mother. “I wanted to see what I am made of. Creating it felt natural, since blending cultures has always been my reality,” he says. “The whole album is an exercise, production-wise, in what type of songs I could fit in a genre. Let’s say that would be called Afro Fado.”

The cover matches the album’s thematic weight – a picture of Portuguese fado icon Amália Rodrigues shaking hands with Mozambique-born footballer Eusébio, who played for Portugal. “Eusébio and Amália are two massive symbols of Portuguese culture, and seeing them together was very emotional for me, so it became the artwork guiding the album.”

Fittingly, Slow J flipped the expectations of fado with his album: Afro Fado merges the binary, staking a claim in tradition without making compromises. Take the opening track ‘Tata’, a tribute to his Angolan father and his roots. ‘Tata wanange, quanto tempo p’ra te encontrar?’, he asks, ‘How long until I find you?’ It is a deeply personal song, where fado is detected in the heartfelt longing and the plucked acoustic chords before a simple hip-hop beat kicks in. ‘Wanange’ is a Kimbundu word (an Angolan Bantu language) that asks, ‘How are you?’“It’s a metaphor for my relationship with Angola and with my father,” he explains. “When I feel close to him, I feel close to Angola.”

The search for roots continues on ‘Origami’, which opens with a plucked guitar melody, and features hip-hop artist GSon. Together, they apply fado’s core emotion of saudade, a deep yearning, to ancestry (‘Inside me I have the sea, I have the Sahara’). Meanwhile, ‘CorDaPele’ articulates the collective identity element of Afro Fado in a broader cultural and political conversation: ‘Tu, pensas na cor da pele como a capilar. Nós vimos do futuro p’a lhes ensinar’ (You think of skin colour like hair colour. We came from the future to teach them), he raps calmly. Bending the sound of the guitar, like on an old, broken tape recorder, Slow J adds danceable rhythm with percussive instruments, extracting the past into the present. It is a fitting lyric that perhaps unconsciously serves to remind us that Slow J, by employing the term ‘Afro Fado’, reminds us that fado was, in fact, born from African roots.

According to the research of musicologist Rui Vieira Nery – whose guitarist-father Raul Nery toured with Amália – fado’s origins are not just Portuguese, but also African. “It’s astonishing how little we know about fado and its history,” Nery said during a conference at Brown University, tracing the genre’s swaying melodic patterns back to the chant and dance of Angola’s lundum.

It’s uncertain whether Slow J was aware he was bringing fado back full circle by naming his album Afro Fado. His intention was simply to explore the realities he has personally experienced. “I have always found it really interesting to mix musical styles, and to understand how the narratives of that serve as cornerstones to national identity, and how you can find enriching conversations between them,” says Slow J.

He is not the only artist to examine Portugal’s multicultural identity and spark such conversations. Genre-defying artist Dino d’Santiago paints a transatlantic map of influences that questions and confronts Portugal’s dark colonial history. He is highly influential in using his music and public voice to fight racism, promote equality and celebrate Afro-Lusophone identity.

“Lisbon is a ponto de encontro, as we call it – a meeting point”, d’Santiago asserts. “Being Portuguese is being plural, you know, and that’s a superpower.” Recognised for building a cultural bridge from Portugal to Cape Verde, cultural fusion has become his trademark. Like Slow J, he sees fado – a genre that has historically excluded Black voices and dismissed its African roots – as one element in a sonic identity that incorporates electronic beats, Creole lyrics and African rhythms.

“It was because I had the courage to go to see my roots in Cape Verde that I got the opportunity to feel like 200% of a person. I’m not half Cape Verdean and half Portuguese. I’m 100% Portuguese and 100% Cape Verdean,” he explains. He was born and raised in Portugal but says he made a conscious effort to recognise his Cape Verde roots, which was essential to his musical upbringing. “I started in music because of [Cape Verdean styles] morna, batuque and funaná – it was the music that we listened to at home with my parents. But I have my roots in Portugal too. I’m proud to be Portuguese because of Amália, like I’m proud to be Cape Verdean because of [Cape Verdean singer] Cesária Évora”, he says.

In 2012, d’Santiago worked on Chamam-lhe Fado, an album by Jorge Fernando, a renowned Portuguese fado singer and guitarist who has worked with Mariza, Ana Moura and others. He says that experience naturally brought him closer to fado, “Naturally we heard a lot about Amália, because [Fernando] played guitar for her for 20 years”. Following this, d’Santiago went on to subtly incorporate fado into his own work. His 2013 debut album, Eva, saw him blend Cape Verdean roots music with the Portuguese genre, the melancholy minor patterns that characterise fado underpinning the meditative feel of the album.

While d’Santiago has continued to work with Fernando (notably on 2018’s De Mim Para Mim), as well as another significant fado singer, Sara Correia, his later solo work has marked a shift away from the characteristic sound of fado. Mundu Nôbu (2018), its title referring to a ‘new world’ or ‘new Lisbon’, is a celebration of Creole Lisbon, the city imagined as both a physical place and a metaphor, proving that Lisbon not only was, but still is, a city where sounds and identities from Europe, Africa and the Americas merge seamlessly. On follow-ups, KRIOLA (2020) and Badiu (2021), he drilled into the tensions of this Creole Lisbon. On ‘Africa di Nôs’, he sings ‘Ês bem p’ês tranu nôs txom / Ês bem furtá nôs kultura’ (You came here as a stranger / You stole our culture), conveying a feeling of displacement and otherness. On ‘Kriolu (feat Julinho KSD)’, he sings ‘Sigo na fé com as ilhas na mira… Nu ta mistura nôs tudu eh kriolu’ (I continue to believe with the islands in my sight… in this mix, we are all Creole), emphasising his love of island culture and its faith in cultural lineage.

Dino d’Santiago has become not only a bridge between Portugal and Cape Verde, switching between Portuguese and Cape Verdean Creole lyrics, but also a bridge between Portugal and the wider Lusophone world. In 2025, he created Adilson, an opera about an Angolan man living in Portugal who spends decades struggling through a bureaucratic maze in an effort to obtain Portuguese citizenship. In 2026, he will release an album with the Brazilians Criolo and Amaro Freitas – their first single together, ‘Esperança’, was nominated for a Latin Grammy in 2024.

On ‘Esquinas’, a 2021 collaboration between d’Santiago and Slow J, the latter evokes fado to explore the nuances of their layered heritage: ‘Porque eu não sou do bairro, eu sou da raça que os habita / Quando eu canto fado soa a mais do que uma vida e eu não sei explicar… Sou da raça lusa vinda do outro lado do mundo’ (I’m not from the barrio, I’m from the race that inhabits it / When I sing fado I sound like more than one life and I can’t explain it… I am of the Lusophone race from the other side of the world). Slow J further demonstrated his close connection to Angola with his latest single, ‘Vândalos???’, his response to the deadly government action that followed protests in Angola in July 2025.

Their multiculturalism comes at a time when many are alarmed by the political shift in Portugal and what it means to its diasporic communities. The country’s far-right Chega party made historic gains in the 2025 election, overtaking the centre-left socialist party for the first time to become the second-largest party in parliament. Chega are anti-immigration, seeking stronger border control and strict deportation laws, with tougher measures on Cape Verdean and Angolan families seeking family reunification and nationality procedures. “I think music is the biggest weapon that we have because it is grounds for the biggest mobilisation. We don’t have issues mixing fado with other genres, and that’s amazing, that’s our call,” says d’Santiago. “We speak out with music and we collaborate more than ever. And that’s how we stay firm in the centre, keeping the balance, even if Europe goes extreme right.”

In the hands of artists like Slow J and Dino d’Santiago, fado becomes a way to signify Portuguese identity, while also weaving an invisible thread of erased Black and diasporic contributions back into Portuguese music and culture at large. Given the ongoing political uncertainty in Portugal today, their bridges across the Lusophone world are more important than ever.