In December 2025, Ebony walked onto the WME Awards stage, Billboard Brasil’s ceremony honoring women in music, eight years into her career, with three albums and 300 million streams under her belt, to receive a Revelation of the Year trophy. During her speech, she asked: “How much does a Black woman in rap need to achieve to be considered a revelation? Would the bar be the same for artists in other genres, with agencies and powerful managers?” Then, she dedicated the trophy to NandaTsunami, the Brazilian artist she called “the true revelation of rap in 2025.”
At 25-years-old, Ebony started rapping when she was 15. “All of my facets, from my most childlike parts to my womanhood, my Blackness, all of it was shaped by rap,” Ebony tells Remezcla. She has spent the last decade figuring herself out through the genre, and what she has found is clarity about who she is and about what the industry still refuses to see. At one of Brazil’s most prestigious events, she held up a mirror to the industry, showing that the most urgent rap in Brazil right now doesn’t sound like the men who run it.
The issue arose after years of observing Brazilian rap—once a genre built on political urgency, peripheral voices, and artistic risk—drift toward becoming a safer, more profitable commodity. As the men who largely built and dominated the scene got bigger, the work stopped taking risks. Songs that once held the weight of the periphery started sounding like they were written in a boardroom. By the mid-2020s, the biggest names in Brazilian rap had more in common with influencers than with the genre’s founders. Artists like Matuê, L7NNON, and Filipe Ret built empires—record labels, brand partnerships, sold-out arena tours—yet none of that power was used to open doors for the women who had been building alongside them.
A 2022 Itaú Cultural study found that women accounted for just eight percent of Brazilian rap. And despite the growth of female artists in recent years, according to a 2025 report by ECAD, Brazil’s central music rights collection organization, their revenue still amounts to less than 10 percent of the sector’s total. The industry had shrunk the space but kept the money. The women who stayed despite this ultimately saved the genre.
The shift presented the opportunity for visibility. In 2023, Ebony made it explicit with “Espero que Entendam,” calling out the biggest names in Brazilian rap—L7NNON, Filipe Ret, Baco Exu do Blues, Djonga, Orochi—not to start beef, but to expose a pattern. “I have the face, the body, and the rhymes. If I had a dick, these guys would be all over me,” she rapped. The track went viral, kicking off a conversation about the structural sexism baked into Brazilian rap: who gets signed, who gets features, who gets booked, and who gets told to wait their turn.
What separates them from the male mainstream isn’t just gender—it’s honesty. Somewhere along the line, mainstream male rap traded it for brand deals and streaming formulas. Ebony never did. “We’re always being tempted by the will to give up, to leave everything behind,” she says. “And I think I’m always rapping in a way where I let that show through in my lyrics. It wasn’t intentional, but it’s definitely a trait that follows my pen.” That process is what allows her to move through difficult territory with ease, the topics that make others flinch.
Though Ebony shouted her out, NandaTsunami didn’t need the award to make her case. Her music moves between rap, funk, sexuality, and spirituality in a way the market is still trying to categorize. When “P.I.T.T.Y. (Parecendo Uma Cafetina)” dropped in October 2025, it took over TikTok and Instagram and landed on the Billboard Brasil Hot 100 chart. A female rap track with no pop crossover, no strategic feature, charting on its own terms. “This moment of change happened precisely when I managed to show the public who I am,” she shares with Remezcla. That’s the thing about NandaTsunami: she’s not adapting to the industry’s idea of what a rapper should be.
The same refusal to shrink runs through AJULLIACOSTA’s Novo Testamento, released in September 2025, a classic boom bap woven with trap, with KL Jay and Mu540 on the credits, and zero concessions in the lyricism. She arrived at the record after winning the BET Awards 2025 as Best New International Act and attended shows at Paris Fashion Week. But the album isn’t about the accolades. It’s about what you do when the world starts watching. “It reflects a very intense moment of self-knowledge, where I rediscovered what I like musically, how things flow through me,” she tells Remezcla.
The revolution she’s proposing is personal before it’s political. “What is revolution for you? Sometimes, for someone, it’s simply doing something they love. For another person, it’s having more social consciousness,” she says. On the track Até Sob a Luz do Seu Olhar, she gets specific: “I’m talking about a type of love where I’ll love you, I’ll be here for whatever you need—but I won’t be the woman who stays home, in your shadow. I think that’s revolutionary.”
Rio de Janeiro’s Amabbi asks a different question on Crisálida, released in March 2026, but points in the same direction. The album was built from podcasts, books, and the conversations women have in cafés when no one is paying attention. “I wanted to bring the chrysalis because it’s not the start and it’s not the finish, it’s the middle. Where almost nobody looks,” she explains. “They are not ready to lose. The train is coming, and it only has the baddest on board.”
Together, these four artists don’t form a movement; they form an argument. Brazilian male rap keeps repeating formulas because it was rewarded for doing so. The women are reimagining the genre because they were never given anything until it was impossible to ignore. They didn’t suddenly join rap. They were always here, and now they’re the ones defining the genre.