A light start and processed choruses accommodate Rita Onofre’s voice to warn “Eu só sei que vai doer” (“I just know it will hurt”). This is how “introlúdio (tanto mundo)” starts, an invitation song from “Hipersensível”, Rita Onofre’s debut album, released last 17th February and that will be presented at ZDB. It was during the pandemic that she started to make herself heard, breaking the stranglehold of starting in these parts: first in “Inéditos Vodafone” (with “Ao Pé de Mim”) and then in Novos Talentos Fnac (with “À Porta”). It was 2020 and the good start motivated Rita to take the next step, an EP in 2021, “Raiz”.

Going back to “introlúdio”, on the entrance track and on the final one, “interlúdio no fim (abrir)”, the voice of the singer-guitarist comes muffled, ghostly, different from the eight songs that fit there in the middle. As if it were necessary to limit them between two poles and, in doing so, let the listener be surprised by the light and at-will spells of “Hipersensível”. “Perdoei” and “Rancor” follow “introlúdio”, also the first and second single from the debut album, and concretise the possibilities of a first work that matures in the ears.

Rita Onofre’s rhythm is smooth, when you hear processed choruses again, as on “Passo”, they expand, run alive and happy and condense the jazz strokes that the singer puts on these pop songs that are born from the guitar and swing over the voice. Short songs, worried in placing in the centre all the core and introspection that led to the creation of “Hipersensível”, fruit of two retreats of the artist (currently 26 years old), where she stopped to think about life, about herself and how to adapt what is in her head in songs that proclaim the existence of the quotidian as catharsis. In all, there are a little more than twenty minutes, distributed over ten themes of someone who hopes in 2023 to accomplish in the best way what she started in 2020 and overcome herself in the best way she knows how, with songs. AS