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“BROOKZILL!'s debut album, Throwback to the Future, is an exuberant mash-up of old-school hip-hop, funky jazz, and Brazilian funk and pop that captures the best aspects of all the separate ingredients and revels in the combination they make. Created by legendary producer Prince Paul, Digable Planets' Ladybug Mecca, keyboardist Don Newkirk (who trainspotters might remember from his voice-overs on De La Soul's Three Feet High and Rising), and Brazilian hip-hop icon Rodrigo Brandão, the project is good-time grooves and grin-inducing fun from beginning to end. With guests on board who range from Gil Scott-Heron collaborator Brian Jackson to Del the Funky Homosapien and a raft of Brazilian artists, Throwback plays out like a street party where the alcohol flows and people are dancing like the weekend will never end. Prince Paul holds down the turntables, dropping in samples and locking down rock-solid hip-hop beats and rollicking Brazilian grooves while Ladybug lays down rhymes like it was 1993, and her sweet vocals add some honey to the mix.” – All Music

“About half of the lyrics on BROOKZILL!’s debut, Throwback to the Future, are in Portuguese, but this doesn’t obscure the album’s overarching themes of unity, tribute, and spirituality for non-native speakers. While they possess more polemical meanings, certain words and phrases, like “macumba,” a Brazilian religious practice, will ostensibly be accepted at face value for its celebratory invocation on “Macumba 3000.” Macumba is an encapsulation of BROOKZILL!’S syncretic purpose: bringing people together under the banner of music.

BROOKZILL’s cultural synthesis wouldn’t be possible without the skillfully realized instrumentation: 808-style breakbeats are masterfully mixed with samba percussion on “Raise the Flag,” “Mysterious,” and “S. Bento MC5,” creating unexpected rhythms, but ones which still make sense within a traditional hip-hop framework. On “Nascido No Céu,” bossa-nova horns and woodwind instruments align with synthesizers and turntablism to lay slow-jam groundwork for Ladybug Mecca and Gorila Urban’s rhymes. Though the beats never threaten to become generic like on “Mad Dog in Yoruba” and “BROOKZILL Suite,” which lean more on the album’s Brazilian musical influences, they emphasize Throwback to the Future’s individuality and cross-cultural appreciation in a way a more streamlined mash-up would not.” – Slant Magazine

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