Inka, born Albreydy Alberto Holguín Roque, is a rapper and producer from Villa Mella. He works in the Dominican alternative scene rather than in dembow, and the whole of what he does starts from the neighbourhood he comes from.

Where the drums are

Villa Mella, in Santo Domingo Norte, is where the Cofradía del Espíritu Santo keeps the congos — the drum tradition UNESCO listed as intangible heritage — and where priprí and the atabales are still played as living music rather than as folklore for visitors.

Party de Palo is what he built out of that. It is a rap record with palos under it, made with Evaristo Moreno, who comes from one of the families that carried priprí, and it opens with a poem for the barrio. The joke in the title is exact: a party of palo, meaning both the drums and the party.

Pitchfork reviewed the track, which for a rap single made in Santo Domingo Norte is not a normal outcome.

Villa Mella

The album took the neighbourhood’s name. It came out in 2023 and Rolling Stone put it among the fifty best albums of that year — a Dominican rap record built on ancestral Afro-Dominican rhythm, sitting on an international list beside things made with a hundred times the budget.

He has said he makes music out of a personal and spiritual need to express something, which sounds like the sort of thing artists say until you notice that the record is an argument for a place rather than for himself.

Onstage

He played Isle of Light, closing on Gracias and Party de Palo. Live, the rap and the drums are in the same room, which is the point: nothing about the project treats the tradition as a sample to be borrowed.

He is young, and the recorded catalogue is still short. What is already clear is the position — a rapper who went back into his own barrio for the rhythm section instead of importing one.