Charlotte Dos Santos is an artist originally from Norway, but now based in Berlin. She made her debut with Fresh Selects in 2017 with the release of her album Cleo. In 2020, she made her debut on Because Music with the EP Harvest Time. Now she returns with a new full-length album, Morfo.

Dos Santos originally began working on this album at the beginning of the pandemic under the title of Metamorphosis. After spending some time with the project and removing a song by that title, she shifted and changed the name to Morfo, which is a reference to the morpho butterflies, which populate the rainforests of South America. She chose this because it still represents the idea of metamorphosis, while also paying respect to her Brazilian heritage on her father’s side of the family. As one can imagine, growing up in Norway the daughter of a Black Brazilian man and a Norwegian woman can be a complicated thing. And that is much of the exploration of Morfo as an album – that exploration of heritage, a search for belonging, and just growing into the comfort of one’s own skin. To accomplish all of this, Dos Santos is working with live instrumentation and writing songs that weave through soul, jazz, samba, R&B, hip hop, and more, connecting all of her musical worlds to her lived-in worlds. The arrangements are really smart, but what really ties everything together is Dos Santos’ voice on the mic. She has a really gentle vocal delivery as she sings that gives the album a bit of a conversational feel to it. She has a great tone to her voice, and an even better sense of melody, which helps root the album and makes all of the ideas presented across the album stick in your head. There is a lot of vulnerability in Dos Santos’ lyricism, but don’t mistake that for weakness, because she picks her moments to come in with confidence and put those in place that have done her wrong in the past, and to claim her own space going forward.

Charlotte Dos Santos promised growth and evolution in titling this album, and she’s delivered just that with Morfo. She’s taking musical risks and making it sound effortless, and she’s allowing herself to be vulnerable as she explores all of these issues of identity and self-discovery, making for an album that is really easy to form a personal connection to.