There’s a side of African music that rarely attracts the same attention as the artists on stage. It exists in writing rooms and recording studios, where producers and songwriters shape records long before they reach an audience. Chinaza King Nazzy has built much of his work in those spaces. As a producer, songwriter and live music curator, he’s one of the figures doing the actual engineering behind a sound the rest of the world is only now catching up to, and his growing catalogue is starting to make the case for itself

Nazzy’s ear was built in two very different rooms. He came up in Lagos, in the collaborative studio sessions where a song can change shape three times before lunch, and the best takes usually come from instinct, not planning. That’s where he learned to work fast and trust the moment. London gave him something else: structure, patience, and the discipline of the UK’s more clinical studio culture. What he’s built since is neither one nor the other. It’s Nigeria studio energy filtered through UK precision, and it doesn’t sound like anyone’s template but his own. 

You can hear that range across his catalogue. He’ll anchor a UK rap record one week and build out a contemporary urban baseline the next, and neither feels like a detour. Nothing about it is forced. His arrangements tend to leave room rather than fill it, which matters because his songs have to hold up twice: once on record, once on a stage. That’s a harder brief than it sounds, and it’s probably why his name doesn’t announce itself the way a signature sound would. He’s not chasing a stamp. He’s chasing whatever the song actually needs. 

On TKandZ’s “London2Paris,” Nazzy worked as arranger and creative director, and his fingerprints are in what the record chooses not to do as much as what it includes. There’s no scaffolding here, no ornamental layering for its own sake, just a song that trusts its own centre of gravity. That’s a specific kind of authorship, the kind that shapes a record’s shape rather than its sound, deciding what stays out of the way so the melody can carry the weight it’s built to carry. 

That restraint matters because of what the song is actually carrying. Underneath its travel imagery, the flights, the whip, the cities passing like scenery, “London2Paris” is a record about outrunning pressure rather than celebrating escape. TKandZ names the exhaustion plainly: three years in, close enough to the top to feel people repositioning around him, watched by people who’d rather copy the formula than watch him win. 

There’s real fatigue in the writing too, a stretch where the confidence cracks and he admits to losing faith, wanting to rewrite the chapter he’s in rather than push through it, before the record pulls itself back into motion. That’s the tension the arrangement is built to hold: a song that has to sound light enough to move at speed while carrying something considerably heavier underneath it. Nothing in the production overstates that weight or undercuts it. It just gives the vocal enough room to hold both at once, which is the harder job than it looks. 

The restraint isn’t absence; it’s direction, and it’s the decision that lets the record travel as easily as its title implies it should, even when what it’s moving away from is more complicated than the hook lets on. 

Gift OFA’s “Setting” asks something else of him entirely. Nazzy wrote, composed and co-produced the record, three roles working toward one idea rather than three. The song isn’t about arrival so much as about staying sharp on the way there. The writing moves fluidly between Yoruba, Pidgin and English, never settling fully into one register, which mirrors exactly what the lyrics are describing. Gratitude sits next to vigilance throughout relief at having survived a harder chapter, paired with a clear-eyed refusal to get comfortable too soon. 

“Only by grace say we dey” and “Olohun se, say the time go reach my turn” hold that tension inside two lines: faith functioning less like comfort and more like infrastructure. The hook, “I’m on a setting,” repeats itself into meaning not a finish line, but a coordinate, a way of locating yourself inside motion you haven’t finished yet. It’s a song about ease that never quite lets its guard down, which is a more disciplined position than pure celebration would be. Two records, two entirely different job descriptions, and the same instinct running underneath both: know exactly how much a song needs and stop there. 

Taken together, “London2Paris” and “Setting” show a producer and songwriter who approaches each project with a clear sense of structure, balance and purpose. Rather than relying on a fixed production formula, Chinaza King Nazzy adapts his contribution to the needs of the record, whether through arrangement, songwriting or creative direction. As his catalogue continues to expand across international collaborations, that consistency remains one of the defining characteristics of his work.