XEXA: Building Worlds Beyond Earth on Kissom

When XEXA released her debut Vibrações de Prata, it stood out like an alien signal in Príncipe’s catalog. The Lisbon label had built its reputation on batida—a frenetic, percussive mutation of Angolan rhythms like kuduro and kizomba, rewired with raw synths and metallic samples. But Vibrações de Prata barely moved to that pulse. It was a record you listened to more than you danced to, steeped in atmosphere and shadow. Its closer, “Clarinet Mood,” drifted through field recordings of squawking seagulls and splashing waves, evoking something spectral and lonely—like Brighton Pier swallowed in the fog of Silent Hill 2. The track felt closer to an improvisational set at London’s experimental Cafe OTO than a night at Lisbon’s raucous MusicBox. Fittingly, XEXA composed it in London, while studying at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where her imagination began to stretch beyond the city that raised her.

Though she grew up in Quinta do Mocho—the same housing complex that birthed batida’s pioneers, including DJ Marfox—XEXA has never treated Lisbon as her anchor. Her compass points elsewhere, toward Afrofuturism, toward the imagined worlds that music can build. “I’m interested in visualizing the future,” she once told Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, “where the future means development and independence.” That drive for self-definition threads through her work. Both Vibrações de Prata and her new record Kissom experiment restlessly with form and texture, but where her debut felt exploratory, Kissom feels inhabited. It binds the stray ideas of her first album into something more cohesive—less a collage, more a universe.

Kissom is what heat haze might sound like. Its synths shimmer and warp like sunlight bending at the horizon, swallowing rhythm and melody into liquid shapes. The opening track, “Project 8,” takes a sinuous bassline and winds it upward until it becomes a writhing glissando reminiscent of Pinch’s dubstep classic “Qawwali,” vibrating around 140 BPM. On “Txê,” XEXA manipulates fluttering synths that dart across the mix like the hand of a magician, blending them with stray sounds—dog barks, infant gasps—that feel snatched from some half-remembered dream. She loops and distorts her motifs until they feel elastic, stretching and snapping back into place. Everything is in flux, constantly recombining, yet always tethered to her distinct sense of rhythm and space.

Sometimes the pulse becomes almost tangible. “Kizomba 003” begins with the faint sketch of a kizomba rhythm—light, teasing hi-hats tracing an outline—before a tide of synths surges through, turning it into something grander and more forceful. Her voice follows suit, adapting to the shape-shifting world she builds around it. “Tenho o coração apaixonado,” she sings in a low, supple contralto, before twisting her tone into a quivering half-laugh: “Como assim trabalhar,” as if she’s choking on the words. Her vocals bend and stretch just like her synths, but they never feel vaporous or distant. They are warm, physical, and grounded—human touch inside a synthetic mirage.

That groundedness is crucial, because XEXA’s music thrives on contrast. Her rhythms are wild but not chaotic, her melodies elusive but emotionally direct. On “Pulse Bounce,” percussion ricochets around the stereo field—cymbals crash to the left, snares spill through the center, hi-hats shimmer right at the listener’s ear. “Será” explodes in bursts of toms that sound like fireworks muffled in colored smoke, bursting and dissipating in slow motion. These moments of rhythmic play tie Kissom together. Where Vibrações de Prata sometimes felt like three records competing for space—folk, ambient, and experimental all tugging in different directions—Kissom moves as one organism, breathing and morphing but always coherent. Only on “Xtinti,” which ends just as it begins to gain momentum, does that continuity falter.

When XEXA gives her music room to unfurl, it becomes transformative. “Transversive Line” begins with soft keys and mournful brass, but as the bassline slips away, its glowing synths start to drift upward like released balloons. It’s bittersweet—an ache suspended in light. “Quem És Tu,” the album’s 12-minute centerpiece, builds from a dark, humming synth figure into a crescendo of sitar runs and rattling wooden percussion, as if traditional and futuristic sounds are fusing in real time. The track is both expansive and intimate, radiating the spiritual curiosity that defines her work.

This is what makes Kissom such a remarkable step forward. Batida has always been about individuality—finding your lane, your sound—but XEXA isn’t just finding hers; she’s transcending the highway altogether. Her world is fluid, borderless, and radiant, drawing from the diasporic imagination of Afrofuturism without ever feeling like imitation.

In Kissom, XEXA envisions music not as a document of place but as a portal—one that connects her roots in Lisbon and Angola to something uncharted and cosmic. The record ripples with the heat of creation, with the feeling of sound still forming itself. It’s not a rejection of batida, but its evolution—a reminder that the genre’s true pulse lies not in percussion or tempo, but in the courage to imagine what comes next.

With Kissom, XEXA isn’t just in her own lane. She’s long departed the road, floating somewhere light-years away, sketching the future in silver vibrations.