Nídia / Valentina Magaletti / Nídia & Valentina: Estradas Album Review

It’s not easy to tell who’s doing what on “Mata,” one of the highlights of Nídia and Valentina Magaletti’s debut album together. Neither artist has attempted a collaboration quite like this before, and perhaps that’s why it’s so propulsive. Beatmaker Nídia has never worked with a prominent multi-instrumentalist providing raw material on the fly; drummer Magaletti doesn’t typically work within a dance music context, especially not one like Nídia’s. In “Mata,” their scuffed congas, bongos, and synths go scrambling around the beat, alive with the anticipation of how they might interlock next. You can hear the two artists pushing each other as they meet in the middle.

Raised between Bordeaux and her birthplace of Vale da Amoreira, in the greater Lisbon region, Nídia has moved outward from her roots in the Lisbon scene’s continuum of diasporic sounds, like kuduro and tarraxinha, from Lusophone Africa. Since emerging on SoundCloud as a teenager and joining the label Príncipe Discos, she’s put her spin on tracks from Fever Ray, Yaeji, and Kelela and mingled with a wide sweep of global party sounds to demonstrate just how far she can take her beats without losing her signature flair. The Italy-born, London-based Magaletti is similarly prolific on a different circuit: Whether she’s making post-hardcore with Moin, tight psychedelic jams with Tomaga, or her anthological solo projects, her unassuming but versatile approach treats percussion as a “narrative” in which each new breakbeat or clattering found object is a natural—and functional—rhythmic choice. Nídia and Valentina have been leaning in parallel directions lately. Nídia’s 2023 album 95 MINDJERES brought her strain of batida into a looser, more open-ended mode, uncannily approximating the improvisational feel of a live band with her laptop-producer chops. Meanwhile, a recent project by Magaletti’s dub band Holy Tongue with Shackleton spotlights the way dance music’s constraints can give a performer’s off-kilter textural idea the freedom to take root and evolve across an extended beat.

Nídia and Magaletti’s collaborative debut, Estradas, gets a lot out of its setup. Each track is built out of shifting polyrhythms that they compose together: Magaletti plays various instrumental lines to make up the beats, while Nídia contributes her own programmed loops. The frothy MIDI snap of Nídia’s earlier projects gives way to a rigorous studio mix courtesy of Magaletti’s Moin bandmate Tom Halstead, with each instrument dutifully mic’d up and given space. When it’s played straight, adapting Nídia-style dance beats to an aesthetic closer to Raime can feel gratuitous, like those blown-out remixes of popular songs you hear in movie trailers. But the ensemble-oriented presentation helps the duo pull off some new tricks.