There is a particular kind of honesty in admitting that love has arrived before you were ready for it. “Follow You,” the new single from Nigerian-Canadian artist Joey Jaey, is built entirely around that admission. 

Sonically, the track sits in the space where Afropop and amapiano meet, with a clean, rolling bounce that feels easy whether you are alone or outside, indoors or in a crowd. The groove of the production is built for replay value and holds the right temperature that lets the vocal work do what it needs to do. For Joey Jaey, that intentionality has always been his strength, and here it is deployed in full. 

The song opens mid-thought with Joey Jaey insisting he has something to say, that it is important.  Gotta let you know what’s on my mind / It’s not redundant / Gotta let you know just all the time. It is the sound of a man caught off guard by what he is feeling, reaching toward someone who arrived without warning, without context: never really seen you before, you must come from far away. He is not performing certainty. He is, simply and honestly, present and trying to stay that way. 

The most striking moment in the record comes in the Igbo refrain Maka love a togbue mụ, togbue mụ, which translates loosely as because love is killing me. It is not a metaphor that asks for interpretation. It lands with the full weight of something felt rather than constructed, a moment where the multilingual texture of Joey Jaey’s identity stops being an aesthetic and becomes the most direct possible expression of where he is. Following immediately: never been in love you see / I’ll go wherever you be yeeah. The admission costs something, and the song lets you feel that cost in full. 

As the record deepens, so does the resolve. The second verse strips away any remaining ambiguity. I know your intentions / I ain’t tell no lies I’ve been true to you / girl I’m your ride or die / I don’t need saving / running through the storm girl / I ain’t caving. This is no longer a man asking whether what he feels is real. The question is, is it love? Is it love that I feel for you? returns as a refrain, but by this point it reads less as doubt and more as wonder. He already knows the answer. He is simply living inside the feeling of knowing it. 

The feature from Lagos-based Meyar Oti gives the record a second gravity. The two artists, one rooted in Toronto, the other in Lagos, bring an easy chemistry to the track that sounds less like a collaboration assembled in post and more like two people who found something together and trusted it. Their dynamic is conversational, unhurried, each voice making space for the other. That quality is difficult to manufacture. Here, it is clearly real, and it adds a dimension to ‘Follow You’ that the song could not have carried alone. 

Listen to “Follow You” here.