STAGES A/LIVE presents Pongo at the Onassis Channel on YouTube

Afrobeats / EDM / Bass Music / Dancehall / Pop

If you don’t know Kuduro, it’s time to learn about it.

Here is an artist often heralded as the new diva of Kuduro. No surprise there, as Pongo always made it her job to constantly freshen up the genre’s heritage by livening up her style with sounds from all over the world. Born in Angola in 1992, the passionate dancer grew up in a wealth of music and rhythms. Traditional Angolan songs, Caribbean Zouk, and Brazilian beats… all provided the soundtrack to her music-filled youth. She was barely 8 when she and her family fled the civil war raging in the country to settle in Portugal. It was there that she took her love for Kuduro music to a whole other level.

Pongo spent her teenage years in the Denon Squad, a local band that initially recruited her as a dancer before letting her pick up the mic to play shows in the neighborhood. It was during those playful times that she caught the stage bug and realized she wanted to keep sharing emotions with her voice. Making a name for herself on Lisbon’s Kuduro scene, she was spotted by Buraka Som Sistema, a band famous for popularizing Kuduro in the early 2000s. Fascinated by the young lady’s aura, the band invited her to play a few more shows before releasing “Kalemba (Wegue Wegue)” in 2009, a track fueled by Pongo’s childhood memories and which is still the band’s biggest success to this day.

Boasting a few million plays across the world, “Kalemba (Wegue Wegue)” laid the foundation for Pongo’s musical signature: music that feels intimate but also shares a universal message while inviting the listener to dance, overcome their struggles, and escape the feeling of sadness and despair. The same empowering message is at the heart of “Tambulaya,” her first single released in 2018. The video, a tribute to the Black Panthers movement, highlights the track’s fiery spirit as well as the singer’s urge to transform painful memories into stellar and positive music.

Flashes of her native Angola came back to life on her first EP, “Baia” (2018), supported by the hybrid sounds of Kuduro, melancholic pop, dancehall, and EDM with lyrics both in Portuguese and Kimbundu (one of the languages spoken in Angola): Pongo casts her spell carrying the elated listener through the nostalgic sounds of “Kuzola” or the sunny “Chora,” while giving birth to a progressive new genre of Kuduro, one that matured into her second EP, “UWA,” in 2020.

Connecting Kuduro to Afrobeats, Favela Funk, or even Afrofunk, she supports her dedication to mixing genres and languages, a way for her to break down all cultural barriers while setting the tone for her debut upcoming project “SAKIDILA”: powerful and addictive party and club music.