Fado has been declared dead, saved, betrayed, and reborn so many times in the last 50 years that a Lisbon taxi driver can recite the cycle. The Portuguese singer Marisa Fonte, 31, whose second album, “Sal Grosso,” was released on Friday, has heard the cycle too. Her response is to ignore it.
“Sal Grosso,” which means coarse salt, is 10 songs, six of them traditional fados that Ms. Fonte learned from her grandmother, who sang in the taverns of Alfama in the 1970s. The other four are originals. All 10 are built on the same foundation: a Portuguese guitar, played with great delicacy by Rui Castanheira, and underneath it a bed of synthesizers, sub-bass, and programmed drums produced by the Porto-based electronic musician Tiago Lobo. The result sounds, on first listen, like a category error. On third listen it sounds like the obvious thing that somebody should have done 20 years ago.
The key is that Ms. Fonte does not change how she sings. Her voice, a dark mezzo with the characteristic fado catch at the top of a phrase, is recorded close and dry, with no reverb and almost no processing, and it sits in front of the electronics the way it would sit in front of a guitar in a tavern. On “Barco Negro,” the most famous song here, she takes the melody slowly and plainly over a pulse that Mr. Lobo keeps at the threshold of audibility until the final verse, when it rises and the song turns from a lament into something closer to a procession.
The originals are less certain. “Madrugada,” a song about a night shift in a hospital, has the album’s best lyric and its weakest arrangement, with a drum pattern that fights the vocal line rather than carrying it. “Rua Nova” is a club track with a fado vocal on top, and the seams show. But “Sal Grosso,” the title song, a five-minute piece about her grandmother’s hands, is the finest thing Ms. Fonte has recorded, and the moment at 3:40 when the electronics drop out and leave only the guitar and the voice is the kind of thing that stops conversation in a room.
There will be objections. There always are. Fado’s guardians, including the casas de fado of Alfama and the Bairro Alto, where Ms. Fonte began, tend to treat amplification as a concession and electronics as an insult. But fado was tavern music before it was heritage, and it absorbed the guitar, the recording studio, and the radio in turn. “Sal Grosso” is not a betrayal of the form. It is the form, doing what it has always done, which is finding a way to be sung tonight.
Ms. Fonte plays the Coliseu dos Recreios in Lisbon on Nov. 7 and tours Europe through December.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 12, 2026, Section A, Page 5 of the European edition with the headline: Review: Marisa Fonte Takes Fado Out of the Tavern and Into the Club, and It Survives the Trip.
