NEKTAR

For her fourth album, Brazil’s Ava Rocha dials down the abstraction of its predecessor, Trança. That album was a broad, bold collection, experimental in its remit. NÉKTAR may not immediately feel as ambitious, but it trades Trança’s breadth for depth, and hones the most intriguing aspects of Rocha’s music – her Bethânia-esque voice, in particular – to a compact set of pop songs. If anything makes this album feel slippery, it’s the ever-morphing electronic textures that mark out good sections of NÉKTAR. But there are lovely nods toward MPB as well, as on the gorgeous “Longe Longe de Mim,” which suggests that Rocha, and collaborators Thiago Nassif and Jonas Sá know how to balance forward-thinking, avant-R&B touches with Rocha’s musical history. A lovely, unexpected album, and one that flew under the radar in 2023, unfairly so.