Lisbon, Portugal
Bluay is a rapper and singer from Casalinho da Ajuda, in Lisbon. By the time the rest of the world heard his name, in September 2026, he had been platinum several times over for the better part of a decade. The name is literal. He has one blue eye and one brown, and it came out of the English for it.
Casalinho da Ajuda is municipal housing on the western edge of Lisbon, up against Monsanto, and it is there because of the first bridge over the Tejo. Families displaced by those works were moved into wooden barracks on the site in 1960 and were not handed keys to permanent flats until 1970. It is still on the city's rehabilitation programme: Gebalis, which runs Lisbon's municipal estates, had work going across 12 buildings and 158 flats there in 2025.
He was born José Carlos Tavares on 21 August 1999. He has told Bantumen that he was taken into care at seven, when the family could not cope financially, and that he started making music at 14 after watching rap battles online.
Piruka's Louco, in 2019, was the one that moved him. It went platinum several times over, held the top of the Portuguese sales chart for nine weeks, and took Canção do Ano at the PLAY awards in 2021. His own Pelos Dois arrived that same year.
Faz Bem, with Julinho KSD, went triple platinum in 2024. Ninguém was his entry to Festival da Canção in 2025. Somewhere in that run the PLAY awards gave him Artista Revelação.
Almost every Portuguese profile of Bluay leads on his sight. He is losing it, and he performs with very little of it left. He has been asking people not to start there since at least 2021:
Quero que as pessoas ou a indústria olhem para mim como músico e não como um músico que tem um problema de visão.
I want people, or the industry, to look at me as a musician and not as a musician who has a vision problem. He said it to Bantumen in December 2021, and it is the line this page is written around.
Voar arrived in October 2025, autobiographical and unembarrassed about it. The video rebuilds his childhood bedroom and sets the boy he was against the father he has become.
It is also the song he was in the middle of at Cais do Sodré, in September 2026, when a stranger walked on and took his microphone.
A stranger took Bluay's microphone at Cais do Sodré and sang four bars about a supermarket. Within a week David Fonseca, MARO and a Portuguese Sign Language interpreter had all covered it, and Pingo Doce had posted an AI cat and deleted it.
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