“To a girl that never dreamed about leaving Brazil to do music, everything that’s happened the last couple of years is so crazy.” São Paulo’s BADSISTA knows what it’s like to be away from home. Taking her bubbling club energy as far as Poland, Uganda and Australia, the producer, DJ and tentative singer born Rafaela Andrade is one of Brazil’s busiest musical exports. There’s her growing portfolio of club productions, fusing the raw energy of Brazilian funk with pop, trap, trance, hip-hop and anything else hard, fast and invigorating. Then there’s her genre-smashing DJ sets, where she takes brain-boggling routes between ballroom, breaks and even ‘00s emo and pop-punk.
But Andrade’s the most important gig of last year was at home in Natal, the northeastern city where her family are from. “Everybody was screaming while I was playing, all my cousins came to the party, I was treated like a queen, it was the last gig of the year and I couldn’t be happier,” she remembers. Being away “can mess up my head. I’ve cried sometimes in airports and hotels – the classic scene. It’s not easy to be from Latin America in Europe.” It looks like life on the road is only going to get more familiar for Andrade, but she’s got a million reasons to stay home too.
Read the feature on DJ Mag (March 2020)
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