In 2018, during the two years that Joshua Emmanuel Pinto João Eduardo, or Blanco, spent in prison, he had an epiphany. He decided to move away from making hardened UK drill music – a genre that he’d helped to popularise as a leading architect of the teenage collective Harlem Spartans – and tap into his Portuguese-language roots. “Drill was fun when I was doing it with people, you bounce off each other,” he says. “But doing it by myself, I couldn’t find any passion. I found passion for the Brazilian sound.”
Losing loved ones while incarcerated had forced him to reflect. When Blanco’s father died in March, he attended the funeral handcuffed to a prison officer. “Going around the coffin with someone who didn’t even know my dad was crazy. My dad always used to say certain things that were important about family. And obviously, in his last moments, I didn’t even get to see him in hospital. That was my fault,” he sighs. His friend Latwaan Griffiths or Latz, a fellow member of Harlem Spartans, was murdered in July 2018. “Prison was a mistake. I didn’t want to go back,” Blanco says.
