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Marla Kether Turns a Session Into a Statement on Luso

Little Simz's touring bassist steps forward with a five-track EP built by filling a room with musicians rather than a laptop with plugins.

For years, Marla Kether has done her most visible work standing just off-center — holding down bass for Little Simz, one of the UK's most decorated rappers, in rooms where the spotlight was never really hers to keep. Luso, her second EP for Strut Records, is where that arrangement flips. It's not a pivot toward pop visibility or a solo spinoff of someone else's sound. It's five songs that put her own instincts as a London-based bassist, producer, and DJ at the center, arriving digitally and physically on October 16, 2026, with a vinyl LP pressing available through Bandcamp for anyone who wants the record as an object and not just a stream.

The backstory matters here as much as the tracklist. Luso was written and developed across two cities, Lisbon and Brasília, and Kether has described the guiding idea plainly: "this project was all about getting musicians into a studio and really celebrating the unbeatable energy of live recording. I wanted the music to feel human, warm and alive, rooted in rhythm, connection and joy." That's not a throwaway line for a press cycle — it shows up in the credits. Opener "A Jam in Paranoá" was built with a full band in the room: Mansur JP on electric guitar and synthesiser, Dila Caju on classical guitar, Felipe Fiuza and Ismael Rattis on percussion, Ayobami Salawu on drums, and Kether herself on bass. She wrote it alongside Mansur JP, Dila Caju, Felipe Fiuza, and Ismael Rattis, then arranged and produced it, with Felipe Fiuza engineering and Matt Cooke recording drums. That's a lot of hands on one song, and the paper trail alone tells you this wasn't assembled in isolation.

## Five Songs, Four Genres, One Room

What makes Luso worth tracking isn't just who played on it — it's how differently each track is built to move. "Blessing," featuring grime rapper Mez, works in Batida. "Run The Track," with Reek0, leans Afrobeat. "Reverse," featuring vocalist Sofia Grant alongside Val Fritz on synth, Poppy Daniels on trumpet, and Allexa Nava, sits in Broken Beat, with Kether playing both bass guitar and synth bass on that one. And closer "Libera," built with Margaridas, is described as a Samba House anthem. Four genre lanes in five songs is an unusual amount of ground to cover on a short release, and it only works because the connective tissue — Kether's bass, her production hand, the live-band foundation — stays constant underneath.

That's really the niche worth paying attention to right now: a record that treats Brazilian musical tradition, Broken Beat, Afro-Portuguese Batida, Afrobeat, and jazz-inflected club music not as separate playlists to sample from, but as one continuous rhythmic language. Kether isn't the only artist working the seams between London's club scene and Lusophone and West African traditions, but few are doing it with a touring musician's ear for how live percussion, bass, vocals, and electronic production actually sit together in a mix — because on Luso, all four of those elements are built to move as one throughout, not stitched in afterward.

## Who's in the Room Says as Much as What's Played

The featured cast reads like a map of Kether's actual creative circle rather than a marketing wishlist — collaborators hand-picked from artists already known for genre-bending work rooted in African, Brazilian, and UK sounds. That's a meaningfully different flex than chasing a name for clout: Sofia Grant, Reek0, Mez, and Margaridas each pull "Luso" toward a different regional and rhythmic reference point, and Strut Records backing the release gives it the kind of label context — one with a long history in global club and jazz crossover music — that suggests this isn't a vanity side-project dressed up as an EP.

There's also something worth sitting with in the fact that a bassist known for someone else's stage is the one insisting on a full room of players for her own record, at a moment when plenty of dance and club music gets built entirely inside a single laptop session. Luso doesn't ask you to take a side in that debate. It just puts five differently-accented, live-tracked answers on the table and lets the contrast between "A Jam in Paranoá" and "Libera" make the argument on its own — that rhythm built by five sets of hands in a room sounds like something a plugin still can't fake.

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