Interview: BNXN And Sarz Want To Soundtrack Your Summer

Posted on by The Native

There is a collaborative streak that runs through the professional lives of BNXN and Sarz. Both artist and producer understand the utility of collaborations as a tool for broadening their musical horizons and treading new paths for others coming after them. That belief is levelling up the listening experience is, in part, what inspired their new joint extended play, ‘The Game Needs Us.’ “We wanted to have a little bit of difference, in terms of what was coming out,” BNXN told Apple Music’s Africa Now Radio. “We felt like it was important to tap into that diversity.”

Moving fluidly between Soul, Calypso, and Alt-Pop influences,  ‘The Game Needs Us’ sees both BNXN and Sarz range forward for what could be next in Afropop. The result is gems like “Back Outside,” “Emotional High,” and “Frank Sinatra”  that captures the synergy between both acts and lays down a gauntlet for Afropop’s immediate future. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.   

What was the ambition for ‘The Game Needs Us?’

There’s been a whole lot of talk around the whole Afrobeats scene. It’s a little up, it’s a little down, so you know there’s highs and lows. Considering the state that we are in right now, there’s a lot more that we need to put out. There’s a lot more diversity we need to exhibit. Everybody’s looking like, “Okay, fine, what’s coming next?” You know, us jumping on Amapiano beats or like House beats and trying to keep on making the same type of vibes that we’ve been on for the past two or three years. That’s not to say that it’s not amazing and we don’t do it nicely and well enough, but it’s like some people were very stuck on the Afrobeats sound. Some people just like it and we wanted to have a little bit of difference, in terms of what was coming out.  We felt like it was important to tap into that diversity.

What’s it like working with Sarz?

Sarz is one of the most prolific and most diverse producers in the world. We felt that it was important to try and experiment with sounds that weren’t [not] necessarily out, but sounds that weren’t at the forefront. We wanted to experiment with sounds that we definitely felt like could make a difference. You know, give people a little bit of “Ah, what is that?” or, you know, “Who made that?” That’s literally the core of the entire project. It’s not even a project where we actually want you to go love everything on there. We want you to find your song and run with it.  Look at someone like Tyla, you can tell that she’s South African, but she likes to show you diversity. It’s like, “Okay fine, [I’m] a global citizen and I can move like that. That’s the kind of aura that we’re coming with on this one. We’re trying to show you that we can play in every field it’s possible. ‘The Game Needs Us’ is as it states. 

How did “Rum & Soda” come about?

It’s [about] people that meet for the first time and feed off each other so much that when they leave, you’re almost like, “Damn, you’re leaving with a version that I feel like I contributed to.” Imagine someone taking my freak that I built brick by brick, but I get it. It’s more like, this person wasn’t really hospitable when I met them. The person probably didn’t know how to communicate, wasn’t really confident in themselves, probably didn’t know how to dress, and probably didn’t know how to style. You know, when a woman meets you and turns up your dress style and your style and your sense, it hurts differently when you leave. That’s what “Rum & Soda” is pretty much about. It’s literally just missing your favorite other and just watching them be with somebody else and it’s like you can’t do anything but just watch.

How was “Back Outside” made?

I wanted something different, and the crazy thing is we started off nicely. When I got into LA, Sarz had changed the beat. He had changed it into something rough. It was more like, it’s just the beat and then my verse comes in, the beat plays again and then the hook. Sarz is like, “I feel like we need more vocal action.” And then I’m like, “I think I have the right chant.” So he starts recording on his phone and then I’m singing and he stops and he’s like, “What the f***? What are you saying?” I’m like, “I don’t even know what I’m saying.” So, he goes, “You know what, we’re going to the studio tomorrow.” We went to the studio the next day and voilà. So, after I’d recorded the chant, I said we need people to chorus it. Sarz says he has the perfect kid choir to handle that in Nigeria and he ran with it. I just wrote the lyrics down and sent it to him and he sent it over to the kids. They recorded it and he arranged it, converted our voices into flutes and that’s what brought the song alive. I’m so proud and happy.

Where did the inspiration for the chant come from?

The interpolation is from Amadou & Mariam. They’re like a legendary duo from Mali, and what’s amazing is they’re blind. So, they can’t really see but all the other senses are 1000%. Rest in peace to Amadou, he died in 2024 but Mariam is still alive and hopefully I get to meet her. African music is so deep and diverse that I could interpolate something like that. It’s even a tiny bit of the entire chant itself but now we’ve made something extremely important out of that and I’m really grateful.

How did “Emotional High” come about?

[This song is proof] of why it’s good to work with people that push you. Would I really want to just go falsetto on everybody like that? Not really. But I’m in the studio with Sarz, I’m in the studio with Nasri. Nasri is someone that’s written for the likes of Chris Brown and so many other artists. He’s an amazing artist and producer. He was the lead singer of Magic!, the band that sang  “Rude.” So, we’re in his house, and I’m recording “Emotional High,” and he’s like, “Sing like, take it up.” I’m like, “I don’t have that voice,” and he’s like, “Come on man, you can do it.” It just worked out.

What “Frank Sinatra” is about

That’s my jam. This is just me trying to be plain and be real with somebody that I really love or I really feel for and I do not want to lose. Imagine you get to rekindle a relationship with somebody that you probably did something bad. But every other time that it’s going good, they start reminding you of the bad thing you did or the mistake you made before. It’s almost like they haven’t forgiven you but they told you they have, and it’s really not a good feeling because it’s like, yes I want you, but I don’t want you to always torment me with that time that I wasn’t 100% here. That’s what “Frank Sinatra” is really about.

What do you want your fans to take away from this project?

I don’t necessarily want you to feel like this is a project where you need to take in as a whole. Every song kind of has its feeling, has its emotion, has its reason, you know. I want people to eat to this, shower to this, and drive to this. You might hear “Back Outside” in the club, but if you’re in the gym, play “Already.” If you’re feeling good, having a good time with friends, play like “Emotional High.” If you just want a calm nice night, you know, play “Rum & Soda” and “Frank Sinatra.” This is music for summer literally, so it captures every activity you could probably think that could happen in summer, every one of them. Find your tune, find your soundtrack and keep it running.

 

Bella Alubo’s “Abo Le (How are you?)” Is a Love Letter to Jos

Posted on by Folake Ajao

There is a particular kind of love that only people who have left a place truly understand. It is quieter than pride, heavier than nostalgia, and it tends to surface at the most unexpected moments. For Bella Alubo, it resurfaced after another round of headlines about Jos, the city where she was born and raised, making the news for all the wrong reasons again earlier this year. 

“Abo Le (How are you),” her latest record, is her response to that feeling. The title translates to “how are you?” in Idoma, and the question is not rhetorical. It is the kind of question you ask when you already know the answer might be complicated, when you are not trying to fix anything but acknowledge that someone is still standing. That is the emotional core of the song, and it is what separates it from the long tradition of issue music that tends to perform concern without actually extending it.

Alubo is deliberate about that distinction. She did not want to make a song about loss in the way loss usually gets packaged for public consumption. No political accusations or sweeping statements about what the government should or should not be doing. “When everybody’s talking about it politically, they stop focusing on the people dealing with the actual thing,” she notes. 

 

“Abo Le (How are you),” bypasses the noise entirely and goes straight to the people living inside the reality. That choice comes from personal experience. Bella went to university in Jos and lived through multiple interruptions caused by the crisis in the city. In primary school, she watched the unrest begin. About six years ago, she was in town shopping for a Christmas outfit with her sister when a bomb went off less than a kilometer away. “I know what that fear is like,” she says. “I know what it is to question your life in a moment like that.” She is not writing from a distance, it is a task of remembrance. 

What makes “Abo Le (How are you)” especially compelling is that it refuses to be only one thing. The hook carries the weight of the song’s intention, checking in, acknowledging home, sitting with what Jos has been through. But the verses hold their own energy. Alubo is still in the building, still talking about the DJ playing her song, still fully herself. That tension reflects something she has been working toward in her career, a refusal to separate the artist from the person. “I’ve never been the baddie type exclusively, or the stereotypic good girl either,” she explains. “I’m a mix of everything that I am, and I feel like this song captures that.”

The music video extends that honesty into the visual. It was shot partly at a school in Jos, one with particular significance. The secondary school did not exist when Bella was initially growing up in Jos, because it was founded by her mother, who saw a gap in the community and built something to fill it. Bella was part of the first set of the primary school, which opened when she was just starting primary one. Returning to shoot there was layered with meaning: “It was two things at the same time,” she says. “Going back to a place that actually meant something to me, and representing my mom’s dream. The main reason I dream as big as I do is because of how big she dreamed.”

The video also makes a conscious choice to center real people. Market women, tricycle drivers, students, faces that belong to the city rather than a curated version of it. “You hear all these stories and it sounds so far and distant, because if you haven’t lived that reality, it’s hard to visualise, even if you sympathise,” Bella says. She wanted to close that gap, to make Jos legible to people who have only ever encountered it in crisis reporting.

The official slogan of Jos is Home of Peace and Tourism, a designation that speaks to what the place actually was and, Bella insists, still is. It sits at the highest point in Nigeria, with a climate so distinct that temperatures drop to around seven degrees in December. It has Shere Hills, a wildlife park, Kurra Falls, and a natural spring that supplies Swan water. It once hosted a Volkswagen plant, still has Nasco and Coca-Cola operations, and used to draw large concerts before security concerns made that difficult to sustain. The international community that has long called Jos home, British, American, Lebanese residents and their schools, did not settle there by accident. “I want people to remember the potential of Jos,” Bella says. “I want people to remember that Jos is still the home of peace and tourism.”

She shot parts of the video on rocks in the city that most tourists never reach. The climb was difficult, and that was part of the point. It is the Jos she grew up in, not the one photographed for travel guides or reported in tear-jerking news reports. “I wanted to give people an insider’s perspective,” she says, describing it in terms of what she calls an ethnographic approach, a view of the city from within rather than from outside looking in.

For Bella, returning to Jos to make this video also marked a personal shift. The last time she shot visuals there, she was around seventeen, rapping freestyles on a bridge, just starting out. The person who came back is different. She works with melodies now. Her collaborators have included YCee, the Notorious B.I.G., Mr Eazi, Sho Madjozi, Niniola and many more. The career she could only imagine from a room in Jos has become real. “It’s still crazy to me when I go back to that state of mind,” she admits. “I was just some random girl in a small town with no connections whatsoever.”

That is what she wants someone from Jos to hear when she listens to “Abo Le (How are you).” Not a celebrity looking back with nostalgia, but proof that the distance between where you are and where you want to be is crossable. The song does not promise anything easy. It does not claim that grief disappears or that the problems facing Jos have been resolved. It just shows up, asks how you are, and means it.

Listen to “Abo Le (How are you)“ here.

Anime Is Being Rescored With African Music On TikTok 

Posted on by Tiléwa Kazeem

It begins in the scroll; a thumb hesitates, then stops. On the small, bright screen, a body is already in motion: a swordsman from Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba cutting through air that seems to ripple with heat. And then, just as the blade lands, a drum answers. Not the expected swell of orchestral tension, but something older, more insistent: the clipped snap of a snare, the restless chatter of percussion, the voice pushing through it all with a kind of joyous urgency. It is Fela Kuti’s “Zombie,” but it does not feel borrowed or imposed. The strike meets the beat too cleanly, the rhythm anticipating movement as if it had always been there, waiting.

Scroll again: A kick from Jujutsu Kaisen lands squarely on the drop of P-Square’s “Personally.” Elsewhere, a sequence from Naruto dissolves into the rolling, percussive intensity of Saheed Osupa, vocals rising, drums colliding, everything on the edge of excess. The effect is disorienting at first, then strangely inevitable. What should feel like a mismatch begins to settle into a kind of logic. The speed, the chaos, and the sudden acceleration, they recognise each other.

Across TikTok, young Nigerians are re-editing anime fight scenes with Afrobeat, Afropop, and Fuji, pairing the speed and volatility of shows like Naruto, Demon Slayer and Jujutsu Kaisen with the dense percussion and vocal urgency of Nigerian music. What began as a niche editing style has quietly evolved into a growing internet subculture. It is simultaneously reintroducing younger audiences to storied music genres while carrying African music into global anime fandom spaces online.

 

Somewhere between Lagos and the algorithm, a quiet act of translation is taking place. For some creators, that instinct has a very precise logic. “Historically, the talking drum – the gàn gàn – and the bàtá were used as morale boosters in battle,” says Chizitere Ifeanyi, owner of Dimpanda on TikTok, whose videos have garnered over a million likes. Speaking to NATIVE Mag, he explains: “Those same instruments are central to Fuji, so that coordinated, unmistakable sound is what I listen for.” Before he even begins editing, he adds, he is already “imagining the fight scenes” in his head, rhythm mapped onto motion and percussion onto impact.

That alignment, as it turns out, is not accidental. “Fuji is percussive and dramatic, anime is intense and motion-heavy, the overlap is natural,” says Tochi Igboko, an A&R at Nigerian culture publication and company, WeTalkSound. In conversation with NATIVEMag, he describes the pairing as a structural fit between sound and image, something that feels intuitive because both forms rely on intensity, rhythm and acceleration.

In these brief, looping videos, something unexpected emerges: not a clash of cultures, but a convergence , as if two distant rhythms had discovered, belatedly, that they had always been moving at the same speed. And increasingly, people are noticing. “People always ask about the music, especially viewers outside Nigeria,” Ifeanyi says. “I usually reply with the song name and artist.” Often, the details are already embedded in the captions before the questions even arrive, a small but telling gesture from a creator who understands that the audience on the other side of these edits is no longer purely Nigerian.

The exchange is subtle but significant. Anime fans arrive for the fight scenes, stay for the music, and then leave with the name of a Fuji artist or Afropop record they might never otherwise have encountered. What emerges is less a fandom crossover than a new route of discovery, one driven not by labels or streaming campaigns, but by algorithms, curiosity and rhythm.

What that suggests, Tochi argues, is a subtle shift in how music travels. “It shows the music is reaching beyond its expected audience, and younger creators are finding their own entry point.” In other words, the edits are not simply reinterpretations; they are informal distribution systems, carrying Nigerian sound into spaces it was never originally designed for but fits nonetheless. 

 

If these edits feel like discovery, they are also arriving at a moment of quiet uncertainty for the sound they draw from. For nearly a decade, Afropop moved with the confidence of inevitability, a genre that seemed to expand endlessly, folding itself into global Pop while retaining its centre. Songs travelled easily; stars like Burna Boy and Rema became fixtures on international charts. But that momentum, once explosive, has begun to settle into something less certain.

In April, a Guardian report on Afrobeats’ global slowdown noted that “nobody knows what works” anymore, a striking admission for a genre that once felt almost mechanically successful. Hits are harder to predict, global breakthroughs are less frequent, and the sense of forward motion has slowed into something closer to recalibration than ascent. Part of the answer increasingly lies in older sonic languages that once defined Nigerian music before globalisation smoothed their edges. Fuji, with its dense percussion, elastic tempo and vocal urgency, has begun to reappear not as nostalgia but as raw material. Artists like Asake and Seyi Vibez draw openly from its cadence and structure, while Adekunle Gold experiments with its textures in more polished forms.

Even within this resurgence, the influence is already filtering into the next generation. Emerging artists like Kayode are reworking Fuji in more direct ways. His track “Aimoye” lifts from Saheed Osupa’s catalogue, reframing it for a younger, digital audience. It is less a revival than a reinterpretation: Fuji not as heritage, but as material.

 

Not everyone is convinced by these kinds of shifts. “It’s change, a lot of Nigerians are afraid of it,” Ifeanyi says, reflecting on the reaction his edits first received. “When they first see something like this, they don’t always see it in a positive light.” The criticism, he notes, hasn’t entirely disappeared. It has only softened into what he describes as “disguised hate.”

From an industry perspective, however, the opportunity is becoming harder to ignore. “From a marketing angle, it gives Fuji a new visual language beyond heritage and live performance,” Tochi says, pointing to how familiar anime imagery can act as a bridge for international audiences. Labels, he suggests, could begin engaging more deliberately with creators already working in this space.

But even that comes with a limit. “It just shouldn’t be forced,” he says. “If it feels engineered, it will die. The value of this is in how organic and unexpected it is.”And for those making these edits, the motivation resists easy categorisation. “I love editing, but our culture is what really boosted that love,” Ifeanyi says. “It’s not just content to me, it’s love. Cultural love.”

Review: Asake’s ‘M$NEY’

In the early hours of Friday, May 1st, as the hundreds of guests at the listening party for Asake’s ‘M$NEY’ milled around the private airplane hangar where the event was held, thousands of fans around the world tuned in to their favored streaming platforms to listen to the album. Among them was popular Nigerian streamer Gilmore, who delivered his verdict on his TikTok live stream: “Instrumentals many pass lyrics for this album,” he clasped his hands and shook his head. “Maybe when we hear it (more), it’ll grow on us.” His commentary—crude as it is—gestures at a simple truth: on ‘M$NEY,’ Asake is upstaged by the production; and without Olamide, his former label boss, in his corner, the cracks in his songwriting are in full glare. 

In February of 2025, six months after releasing his polarizing third studio album ‘Lungu Boy,’ Asake parted ways with his label YBNL. He deleted mentions of the label from his social media, unfollowed everyone on his Instagram, and teamed up with his longtime producer Magicsticks for the lead single of his imminent album ‘M$NEY’ titled “Why Love,” released under his new imprint Giran Republic. As is now tradition when a high-profile artist parts ways with their label, the move prompted a stream of criticism. Fans, who had watched Asake enjoy an unprecedented level of dominance in the Nigerian music industry since he joined Olamide’s YBNL, struggled to make sense of his departure.

Part of the ensuing chaos owed something to the shock value of the news. But a huge part of the concern hinged on a simple question: without Olamide, his trusty mentor and co-writer on many of his early records,  by his side, would Asake be able to live up to his near-mythical standards? Asake’s new album ‘M$NEY,’ a gorgeous pastiche evoking themes of gratitude, wealth, and placidity, in certain ways, feels like his rebuttal to these aspersions. 

The months leading up to ‘M$NEY’ found Asake, who had until then led an uncharacteristically controversy-free career, steeped in drama of epic proportions. In addition to the ripples triggered by his departure from YBNL, and public worry over his decision to jettison Lagos, his home city, for Los Angeles, Tunde Perry, a former associate of his, launched a smear campaign alleging everything from homophobia to misogyny.

 

Another artist might have issued a boilerplate press statement and opted to lie low until the storm ebbs. By contrast, Asake released a heartfelt single, titled “Military,” addressing these concerns. In a bracing display of lyrical deftness, he surfs the glistening production, railing against his detractors, heaping praise on himself, and paying homage to Olamide. With this singular action, he launched a comeback arc culminating in the release of ‘M$NEY.’

“Military” takes on new life in ‘M$NEY.’ Reimagined under a different title: “Oba,” this new version features a spruced-up production and an entirely different set of lyrics. The original version is festooned with sharp rebuttals and rousing self-adulation—“For my set who get money pass me? Ko ma si. Emi kan like lowkey.” By contrast, “Oba” finds Asake delivering anemic and often cliché lyrics: “Big yansh, it is my type/ God dey by my side.” Likewise, his voice takes on a less spirited tone. In a sense, “Oba” functions as a bellwether for the album. In ‘M$NEY,’ Asake, who has never been much of a lyricist, seems even more disinterested in storytelling or offering affecting lyrics. Instead, in his quest to telegraph his new gilded reality, he leads from behind, playing supporting act to the lush production of the album. 

Somehow, this arrangement works better than you’d expect. Consider “Gratitude,” where he offers cookie-cutter lyrics about feeling grateful, taking brief detours to rail against his haters. Nothing he says in the nearly three minutes the song runs for is particularly memorable, a stark contrast from his first two albums, both of which feature an excess of caption-worthy lines, rousing reflections, and cheeky quips. And yet, the odds are that you’ll come away from listening filled with a sobering appreciation for the miracle of life. We mostly have the poignant production of Magicsticks to thank for this. The song opens with a soaring violin melody which gives way to a poignant bass riff evoking the feeling of a church worship session. The effect is that the production sublimates Asake’s tepid lyricism, elevating what might otherwise register as thin or repetitive into a sensorially dense experience. 

 

Songs like “Wa,” “MCBH,” and “Forgiveness,” work the same trick. The luminous production of these songs combines with Asake’s lukewarm lyrics to produce a whole greater than the sum of its parts. You’d however be forgiven for assuming the paucity of lyrical deftness on this project to be absolute. In the songs where he dials down to a more contemplative register and offers heartfelt lyrics—like in “Badman Gangster,” which finds him grappling with his Nigerian identity in the wake of his global superstardom, and “Rora,” arguably the best song on the project—the result is sonic bliss. “Rora,” especially, proves a particularly instructive example of how compelling Asake can be when he pushes beyond platitudes. Over a glistening Magicsticks production, which sounds like the closing score to a feel-good movie, Asake alternates between eulogizing and admonishing himself. It’s a rare moment of unvarnished vulnerability from a man looking down from his gilded castle and reflecting on the merits of patience and humility. 

‘M$NEY’ offers other pleasures, chief among them is Asake’s palpable sense of whimsy. Four albums in, he still retains the very same playfulness that charmed us on his debut album ‘Mr Money With The Vibe.’ In “Asambe,” featuring Kabza De Small,  he dispenses with the faint echoes of introspection that hover around certain portions of the album, lunging headfirst into dance mode. The lyrics here edge close to melodic babble, what Nigerian music fans commonly refer to as “Lamba.” The song is nonetheless terribly mesmerizing. Exploiting pockets of space in the production and deploying precise syncopations, Asake delivers flows that evoke the feeling of a sugar rush. ‘M$NEY’ is also Asake’s most cohesive project. Songs glide into each other with remarkable ease and mostly stick to the album’s themes of gratitude and opulence. 

 

Perhaps the most overlooked strength of ‘M$NEY’ is how well-calibrated the album is for a live show. Most of the songs feature live instrumentation—the supple keys on “Rora,” the elastic grooves of “MCBH”—and arrangements designed for a live show, rather than solitary listening. Whatever reservations you might have of the project are likely to soften once you hear Asake perform “Forgiveness,” “Rora” or “MCBH” to a live audience. 

‘M$NEY’ is simultaneously one of Asake’s most sonically polished projects and one of his least lyrically substantial. For listeners who followed the album’s carefully orchestrated rollout, during which Asake brought his fans into his world, the lack of lyrical heft might register as a disappointment. But approached on its own terms, ‘M$NEY’ has a trove of pleasures to offer. Whether those pleasures will be enough to sustain Asake in the long shadow of Olamide’s absence, however, remains an open question.

Listen to ‘M$NEY’ here. 

Ema Onigah Wants To Sing In Rhythm

Posted on by Emmanuel Esomnofu

There’s a brilliant line in “Chance,” a record from Nigerian artist Ema Onigah. “Why dem no go want to give me chance, when sky no dey ever fit to populate?” Rhyming within the earthy progression of the beat, it’s a sentiment that sprawls across the slim but impressive catalogue of Onigah. If you ask him, there’s no competition between him and anyone else, since everyone has been inspired by distinct life experiences and a perspective that’s adjusted enough to translate those experiences into original compositions. 

‘ITEM VII,’ the singer’s new EP, is made up of such compositions. Its seven songs relay an expressive palette, suffused with influences Ema Onigah has explored throughout his career as a musician. “When I was writing [“Chance”], I was speaking to myself, and explaining my state of mind to my audience, that there’s space for everyone,” he told NATIVE Mag on a recent weekday. “I’m not there to form that entity for comparison with another artist; I’m there to do what I have to contribute to the table of Afrobeats. It might not be the most trending stuff, but people will know that there’s something different Ema Onigah brought.”  

 

That reassurance in his abilities makes sense given the career Ema Onigah has had. With previous collaborators including revered producer Ozedikus and Afropop stalwart Tekno, whom he co-wrote several songs with on ‘Old Romance,’ there’s been no shortage of insider knowledge on how potent Onigah’s pen and delivery can be. This hasn’t always translated to mainstream popularity, even though one senses he doesn’t really obsess over such metrics. “With You,” another record on ‘ITEM VII,’ references the sonic field of what could be called a ‘hit’—crowd vocals, a pared-down lyrical style, an effervescent love tale. In several ways, it represents a new era for Ema Onigah, from his deal with Gamma Records and wanting to introduce himself to a wider audience. 

The name ‘ITEM VII’ came from not wanting to sound “too serious, too boring,” he says. “People said they’ve not heard from me for a long time; people use the slang that I’ve starved them, so this is just Ema Onigah, ‘ITEM VII’”. For those missing the socio-linguistic context, the titular term refers to refreshment time (usually situated in seventh place) within the program of a social gathering, so commonly shared that it’s now become a broader reference. 

“When I dropped my first EP, ‘Dust Off,’ I saw that people understood Ema Onigah more with projects,” he says, “So that’s one of the things that confirmed I’m going for a project after my singles. And especially, I’m the kind of artist who’s fond of project artists like J Cole and Kendrick Lamar. But there’s something about Nigeria, where really it’s not safe for an upcoming artist to drop an album first, so they need an introduction that would give them confidence, so that’s the EP.”

Expanding on his process, the songs on this EP seem more live the cumulative effort of a roving creative mind. “Everytime I’m recording a song, in my mind I’m compiling a project,” he explains. “The way I work on songs, it’s not like people who just vibe; I like to be intentional, I like to find elements. Once I hear a beat, I can still add some things to the beat because I want the song to sound like something that will survive any time it comes out. Even if I’m not using it for a single, it’s something that I’m bold enough to put on a project.”

 

Quite early into our conversation, we discussed Onigah’s love for hip-hop. Like many of his peers, he started out rapping, ostensibly learning about the wealth of storytelling in the music of Modenine and Freestyle, but it was M.I Abaga who broadened his sonic perspective. “Rap made me interested in Afrobeats from a lyrical point, before I started understanding the technicalities of the sound,” he affirms. 

This was the early 2010s, and Onigah was still a youngster in secondary school growing up in mainland Lagos. His parents were religious and so exposure to media at home was limited to radio and TV, where he’d encounter the video of M.I’s “Safe.” He didn’t imbibe a lot of the popular Street music of the era. Rather his early musical education came from the church where he tinkered with drums and keyboard—a singular act of teaching from the church’s keyboardist revolutionised his entire perspective. 

“[He] told me that there’s a way you can record sounds together and loop them, and it’ll come out as probably a loop, so I just discovered if I can join this loop and this loop, I can make an instrumental,” he says. “I remember I was so excited; it was almost like production. So from there, I just knew that I had that vibe that I would like to create music. And then part of it too was secondary school too, like, ‘what can I do so that people can see that this boy is serious too?’ I just found out that I could lace one or two lyrics together.”

Those humble beginnings would blossom into a favorable music career, and by 2020, Onigah was already becoming known among music circles. He would collaborate with budding music company Ejoya, where his verse on “Canabi” would become a project standout. Before then, he’d done a song with pre-“Dumebi” Ozedikus when he was going through a “ really tough time in [his] life,” and though their relationship suffered due to a third-party’s dispute with the producer, they later got back together. 

This time Ozedikus had created some of Mavin’s biggest hits and invited Onigah over to record. “Playful Someone” was born from that time, produced and recorded by Onigah himself, with finishing touches infused by Ozedikus’ experienced hand. He also helped the budding artist upload the record on distribution platforms. “Ozedikus is one of the people I’ll be forever grateful for,” he says. “His house gave me the time to learn how to record myself, expand my ability on beat making”. 

 

Several industry connections later, including the producer Tuzi, he would meet Tekno. That resulted in Onigah working on the latter’s comeback project, ‘Old Romance,’ which had a marked distinction from his sappy classics in the mid 2010s. “He’s one of the pioneers yet he’s humble to learn,” Onigah says. “He taught me about the humility to unlearn and relearn, and then he likes to—everything around him is things that will be pointing him back to the music. He wants his environment to be a place where someone should be inspired to make music. And his work ethic; he takes music more than a nine to five.”

If you speak enough with Ema Onigah, you’ll sense that this is an artist obsessed with development. It’s a humane streak piercing the iron-strong image he depicts, the spirit of poetry which elevates the gait of the uncommon soldier. On ‘ITEM VII,’ those inclinations bear on the music. In typical Onigah fashion, he views his present style as a combination of two distinct elements which separate rapping from singing. 

“It’s a play with rhythm,” he explains, “there’s this unusual rhythm you understand. Some people will describe it as weird, I don’t have to explain it too much; if you listen to my songs you’ll understand. That’s why some people try to qualify it as Rap, ‘cos when it comes to singing, singing is about melody. When it comes to Rap, Rap is about rhythm. But me, I’m trying to sing in rhythm.”

Interview: The Big Hash Wants You To Feel The Love

Posted on by The Native

Nobody quite knows what The Big Hash might be doing on any song. One minute, he’s spitting razor-sharp bars on a song about waiting out the pain of a heartbreak and, on another song, he’s soliloquising about the cost of human foibles on a groovy R&B-tinctured tune. On his new album, ‘Love Is A Star,’ a collaborative effort with SLY and Kabza De Small, that instinct for genre-blurring is leaned into wholeheartedly, whether it’s the breezy refrain of “company” or the Jazzy layering of “make up your mind.”

Importantly, The Big Hash is keen to remind people about the utility of love and its redemptive qualities. “It’s for love, and it’s by love, it’s inspired by love,” he told Apple Music Africa Now Radio about the project. “That’s what I want people to walk away with. If they don’t like the music, at least respect the message. “

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.  

How did you find yourself in music?

It’s never the easiest thing, especially because, coming from a black household, they will not allow anything of a sort even cross your mind. Like, it’s impossible, you cannot even think of doing that. So, it really wasn’t easy, especially because my mom had sacrificed a lot for me to even be able to get to school and do all these things. So, it always feels like you’re letting them down or you’re disappointing them. But I think the lesson is that if you make that choice, you just cannot afford to let them down. So, you need to 100% invest into what you’re doing and make sure that this dream of yours actually becomes a reality. Otherwise you would have just wasted not only their time [but the] sacrifices being made. 

How have you changed as you’ve gone deeper into your career?

I really wasn’t even a man back then. I just came out of school, I didn’t know left to right, right from wrong. I was still trying to figure my life out, just going through a lot of the experiences that I’ve gone through, good, bad, and ugly. Seeing the industry for what it is and at a really young age kind of formed me into the artist that I am now. Having some of those lessons that I’ve learned, taking those Ls at a young age. I’m fortunate that everything happened when I was much younger because there’s some people that it happens in their prime years. 

What’s your approach to songwriting?

I think growing up and understanding that you can’t necessarily say some things out loud, you’re not able to express it as a kid, but when you’re listening to music, some thoughts are set out for you and you soon enough get the inspiration to say some thoughts in the music. I got lost in the source of sound because of me not being able to express myself and finding new ways to do it and falling in love with doing it. 

How did “Company” come about?

I’m gonna blow your mind because I have barely told this story. I’ve told it maybe once. But this song, because it was the very first song that I actually got to work on at Kabza’s studio. At the time, I didn’t actually get to work with him. We had gotten back from Piano Hub. It was really late, and the guys were just like, “Yo, let’s do studio.” Nkosazana Daughter really put my foot into the door,  this project wouldn’t exist without her. So, with “Company,” that was the song that I was able to make when the studio had cleared out, the smoke had cleared, and everyone’s passed out, tired. So, it’s just me and Sly, we worked on it. We forgot about the song for maybe four or five months. It kind of haunted me because I was like, “Man, like I know this song will never drop and Kabza will never actually get to hear what I’m able to do and because he didn’t know who I was for real.” He just thought I was Nkosazana’s friend. So, I think I woke up around like June or maybe July around like 5:00 a.m. and I got woken up by this text message and it’s from Sly. I open it and then it says “Company,” but it says Kabza’s name right there. I’m like, “Wait, what? Wait, whoa, whoa, wait.” Now, I listen to the thing and it’s a completely different song. Like, completely different. The “Company” you’re hearing now is the “Company” that I was shocked with at 5:00 a.m. in the morning that day. 

How was “Ringtone” made?

That song is actually like seven years old and it’s a Trap-Soul song from one of my first projects that came out. It’s called ‘Young.’ So, Sly was just messing around with some of my vocals from old songs and stuff. He decided to take a look into my catalog and it’s one of my fans’ cult classics. So, he was messing around with it and then one day, he’s like, “Yo, bro, I really think you should do something with this.” Honestly speaking, I heard it the first time and I was like, “Yo, this is dope. We can’t put this out.” He’s like, “Why?” I’m like, “Bro, the song is like seven years old, bro. Like, it doesn’t really make sense for what it is right now.” The thing is that I was doubting it and everyone was like, “Okay, you know what, we’ll let it go.” Then next thing you know, Kabza says, “No, I’m playing it on a set.” Now, he’s playing it everywhere and veryone is pushing for the song, the actual song to come out like. So, they go, “No, bro, we don’t care what you say. We’re remixing the song and it’s coming out.”

How are you protecting your authenticity in the industry?

I’ll be very honest with you. I’m winging life at this point. There’s no right way of doing any of this, especially in the music industry. You think that you’re doing something right up until you get the otherwise smacked in your face. I really genuinely would love to be myself at all costs. Sometimes I don’t want to because it costs me a lot of relationships because I’m not a people person. I try my best to also understand that in this industry if you want to get ahead, you can’t be the villain to everybody. So I try and I wing life. I try to be as respectful as I can be even though it’s very easy for the next person to misread your respect as a weakness. But that’s how I survive in the industry. I think I just wing life and I pray to God. 

What do you to want people to feel when listening to the project

Love. If it’s not you loving the music, it’s you loving love. I really do feel as though ‘Love is a Star’ is a project that highlights the highs and lows of this crazy ride, this odyssey that we’re on in life called love. Love is what makes the world go round. Even when, even when you’re bummed out about somebody, you always go back and listen to music that either reminds you of this person or makes you forget about this person. The main point of it is, if love is the main walkaway from this project, I’ll be very happy if everyone knows what this is. It’s for love, and it’s by love, it’s inspired by love. That’s what I want people to walk away with. If they don’t like the music, at least respect the message. 

 

The Tiwa Savage Foundation Is Here To Train The Next Generation Of African Music Stars

Posted on by Boluwatife Adeyemi

Tiwa Savage has spent over a decade building a reputation as one of Africa’s leading figures in music. Her extensive and highly accomplished career, which started to take off around 2012, following her relocation from the United Kingdom to Nigeria, has been aided by her exceptional talent and, crucially, a strong music education that provided her with a sophisticated foundation and technical prowess that set her apart from many of her peers. 

In a recent interview with Forbes, the award-winning singer acknowledged the importance of her time at Berklee College of Music in Boston, revealing that it provided her with world-class training and creative confidence. “I’ve always known when I was leaving Berklee that I would love to give that opportunity that I had to other creators in Africa,” she added. 

Almost two decades after her Berklee graduation, the 46-year-old opened the doors to the Tiwa Savage Foundation, in collaboration with her alma mater, an initiative founded with the aim of discovering and developing the next generation of African music creatives. Running from April 22nd to 26th, the maiden edition of the initiative welcomed 120 participants, who were selected through an audition process, across music production, songwriting, live performance, and the business of music. Through a combination of workshops, mentorship, and collaborative sessions, the attendees engaged in a diverse range of interactive activities integrated into the Berklee faculty curriculum.

 

Adedayo, a drummer who had been looking at advancing his music knowledge at an international institution, found the opportunity very timely. “A day before I saw Tiwa Savage’s post [on Instagram], I was looking up scholarship opportunities abroad. I wanted to study music business, and I saw that Berklee is the best place to study that course,” he said, explaining his motivation for applying for the Tiwa Savage Music Foundation. “The following day, I saw Tiwa Savage’s post on Instagram, and it felt so surreal.” 

Mutay and Irene, two vocalist friends from Port Harcourt, shared a similar sense of gratitude for the timely opportunity after successfully passing the auditions. Throughout the various workshops and sessions, they noted how forthcoming and supportive the Berklee professors and tutors were in their interactions. “It’s been nothing like I’ve experienced before, the tutors and professors are so free. It’s very educative and fun at the same time,” Mutay says. 

Adedayo expressed a similar sentiment, commending the professionalism and excellence displayed by the Berklee staff. “The fact that the actual professors from the institution came down here is fantastic. They haven’t held back at all; they are eager to teach and answer our questions.” 

Reflecting on the experience, the professors also expressed a sense of appreciation and honour to be part of the initiative, noting the eagerness and amount of potential that the participants possessed. “It has been a privilege and honour because this is my first time here in Africa,” Professor Dennis Montgomery III, the director for the Berklee College of Music Reverence Gospel Ensemble, says of his experience participating in the initiative. “It’s been very positive. It feels good to meet people of colour and know there’s a lot of talent over here that’s unfortunately untapped. It, however, doesn’t surprise me at the amount of talent.”

Nicehelle Mungo, a multi-year Grammy Music Educator nominee and Associate Professor at Berklee, also agreed with Professor Dennis Montgomery III, pointing out that the eagerness of the participants is what stands out to her the most. “They have come here, and you can tell they are hungry for something greater,” she says. “What I also love is that they know they have something to offer. If they’re given the opportunity to present what they have to offer, they are going to soar. The fact that they are receptive and eager to learn means a lot.” 

The inaugural edition of the initiative reached its conclusion with a ceremonial finale at the Wole Soyinka Centre for Arts and Culture, previously known as the National Theatre. The closing event, which took place on April 26, served as a vibrant showcase of the week’s progress, featuring original compositions crafted by the participants and guest performances from Teni the Entertainer and Loud Choir. Tiwa Savage also delivered a stirring speech on the evening, admonishing the participants that: “Talent may open the door, but character, preparation, and discipline is what is going to keep you in that room” 

 

The program concluded on a transformative note, as 18 standout participants were awarded scholarships totalling $2.3 million to continue their studies at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. 

Asake Is Meeting The World On His Own Terms

Posted on by Tiléwa Kazeem

Afropop, like many Nigerians, travels with a passport in one hand and hope for global world domination in the other. When success comes, it often circles back for what was left behind: family, food, language, and the little hometown things money suddenly makes room for. But departure has always had its own etiquette. Artists leave for London, Atlanta or Los Angeles and surface online, sounding like customs cleared something in their throat. 

We have watched it countless times, so much that it has become a familiar sport: who has downloaded a new accent and who now speaks as though home is something to be managed. Part of that reaction is simply the Nigerian instinct to turn everything into humour; every few months, a new name enters the dock. Wizkid, Davido, Burna Boy, Shallipopi – the list is long; the jokes, longer. But beneath the laughter sits something more sensitive: the suspicion that success has made someone shamefaced for sounding Nigerian.

The lesson has long been absorbed, especially during the early “Afrobeats to the world” years, when African accents were burdened with stereotypes and foreign labels often preferred stars who sounded more internationally legible: if you want to be global, sound like somewhere else. 

As music journalist Chibuzo Emmanuel tells NATIVE Mag, “The criticism can seem scalding, but part of it is just people taking the piss out of a celebrity.” Asake has flirted with that language too; on the Grammy Awards red carpet, in a GQ profile around Paris Fashion Week appearances, and during a talk at Columbia University, where his cadence seemed to lean outward rather than homeward. Which is why his recent decision to speak Yoruba in interviews feels so pointed. He is not merely choosing comfort. He is suggesting that stardom no longer needs the costume.

 

To read every accent shift as fraud, however, would be too simple. Emmanuel does not see Asake’s earlier speech changes as necessarily performative. Instead, he points to a common instinct of communication: people often mirror the speech patterns of those they are speaking to. Emmanuel, who frequently liaises with foreigners, says, “Sometimes I catch myself doing the same thing.” It may be less theatre than accommodation, the brain’s way of making itself legible to the room. What Nigerians often mock as “downloading an accent” can sometimes be something more ordinary: the human desire to be understood.

Since his breakout in 2022, Yoruba had already been doing the heavy lifting in Asake’s music. It carried his bravado, his spirituality, the coded street wisdom and sly humour, the ‘lamba’ as we like to call it, that made his songs feel rooted even as they travelled. What is different now is that the language has moved beyond the records and into the interview chair. In recent appearances — most notably Spotify’s Frequency series and a homecoming film with Korty — Asake speaks Yoruba with little concession to the imagined foreign listener. The subtitles can do the labour for once. He no longer appears eager to meet the world halfway. 

What is notable is not that Asake speaks Yoruba publicly, but that he does so at a moment of peak global visibility, on platforms usually built around English fluency. In the Spotify interview, spoken largely in Yoruba, he says he is grateful to be using his God-given talent and grateful too that the love surrounding him is no longer only local but global. The sentiment is ordinary enough; the delivery is what matters. He is describing international success in the language of home.

Part of what has made this shift possible is that audiences themselves have changed. The subtitle, once treated by English-speaking markets as an inconvenience, has become ordinary furniture of modern entertainment. Emmanuel tells NATIVE Mag that while it is difficult to measure the exact extent of that influence, subtitles have “definitely played a part”; people are now far more amenable to content in a different language. 

 

Viewers binge Korean dramas without complaint, sing Spanish hooks phonetically in clubs, and fall in love with songs whose titles they cannot pronounce. Streaming has trained a new kind of listener: less insistent on immediate comprehension, more willing to feel first and translate later. In that altered landscape, Yoruba no longer arrives as a barrier but as texture – rhythm, wit, attitude, and intimacy. The world did not suddenly become multilingual; it simply became more willing to meet other languages halfway.

The precedent, of course, already exists. Global audiences have spent the last decade proving that language is not the obstacle the industry once imagined. K-dramas became mainstream through subtitles; Spanish-language records travel far beyond Latin America. Listeners chant choruses they do not literally understand and feel none the poorer for it. As Temitope Olorunnimbe, who works in marketing and label operations at CiDAR Africa, notes, the outrage over Asake speaking Yoruba ignores a simple contradiction: many of the same people complaining happily watch Korean dramas and listen to artists like Bad Bunny. 

The listener, in other words, has already changed. It is only some expectations around African artists that remain outdated. Part of the difference is historical. Latin Pop and K-Pop entered global markets with industries that were permitted to be themselves from the outset, even when translated through subtitles. African music, by contrast, often arrived carrying older burdens: the need to explain itself, to be grateful for access, and to appear polished in ways that reassured foreign gatekeepers. 

The expectation was rarely announced, but it was understood all the same. Be excellent, but also legible. Be local, but not too local. Those conditions are harder to sustain now because Nigeria itself has become harder to ignore. The country has travelled in bodies, appetites and surnames. In cities across America, Canada and Britain, Nigerian restaurants sit comfortably within the new urban food map; jollof rice, suya and puff-puff no longer require ethnographic explanation. 

 

In sport, the names arrive weekly: Victor Osimhen in football, Anthony Joshua in boxing, and Oba Femi in wrestling, whose swaggering entrance and recent WrestleMania triumph over Brock Lesnar travelled online with the speed of folklore. The Nigerian presence is no longer niche, nor apologetic. It is hemmed into the texture of global popular culture. If our food can be tasted, our athletes cheered, our music streamed, our slang borrowed and our accents commercialised, then the old question begins to sound smaller: why not our language too?

Yet symbolism and transformation are not the same thing. It is possible to mistake one man’s freedom for a new rule. Emmanuel, for all his admiration, doubts a stampede will follow. Many artists, he says, “don’t want to be unconventional,” and until something is clearly proven to work, they tend to see it as unique to the person who pulled it off. The music business, in Nigeria as elsewhere, is built less on romance than repetition; artists trust what has already worked, managers sell what can already be explained, and young acts rarely volunteer themselves as experiments. 

To speak Yoruba in a global-facing interview may look simple after Asake has done it, but simplicity is often expensive. It requires stature, leverage, and the comfort of already being wanted. Asake can risk being fully himself because, as Emmanuel notes, “he is big.” Many others, still climbing, will choose English not out of shame but caution. They know a familiar tongue is the open sesame of old doors.

What Asake’s choice finally reveals is not merely pride, but position. In the first eager years of Afrobeats’ journey outward, success often arrived with small, unspoken instructions. Smooth yourself a little. Speak plainly. Translate the room to itself before it asks. English was not always demanded, but it lingered in the air like a condition of entry. Many artists understood this without needing to be told. They carried the music abroad but often felt obliged to carry an explanation with it. 

That a star can now sit before an international platform and speak Yoruba, calmly and without ceremony, while subtitles and audiences make the necessary adjustments, is a more significant circle than it first appears. It tells us that Afropop has moved from petition to presence. The genre now occupies enough real estate in global popular culture to lean its weight upon the furniture, to sit with its legs spread widely apart, and no longer apologise for taking up space. Whether others imitate the gesture tomorrow is almost beside the point. It has happened once, publicly and without collapse. A new possibility has entered the room.

At a time when some speak of Afropop with the weary language reserved for things that have peaked too early, this too should count as movement. Genres do not advance only by trophies, stadiums or quarterly statistics. Sometimes they advance by posture. By who is expected to bend, and who is permitted to remain standing as they are. In that sense, Asake speaking Yoruba is not a curiosity. It is a small correction in the balance of things.

Fimi’s Latest Single, “Nasty,” Is A Statement Of Arrival 

Posted on by The Native

Lauded for her chameleonic flow that’s seen her court mainstream attention, rising Hip-Hop star, Fimi, has released a new single, “Nasty,” delivering a record about stepping into a new era in her unfolding career.  

In essence, “Nasty” is a record about arriving, following Fimi as she steps fully into the person she has become, shaped by years of experience and growth. The song does not shy away from that process. It acknowledges the discomfort, the resistance, and the moments where giving up would have been the easier choice. 

 

Throughout “Nasty,” Fimi tunnels into her thoughts on evolution and change, using her experiences as a narrational tool. What comes through on the other side is a woman who is settled in who she is and unbothered by the opinions that once had weight. Crafted with intention, grit, and bombast, “Nasty” is Fimi at her most direct, helming a story about self-possession and telling it without apology.

Listen to “Nasty” here.

Strei Wants You To Be Free At ‘Night’

Posted on by Frederick Adjavon

As a child growing up in Warri, Delta, Strei ((born Howard Efemena Dominic in Ughelli South, Delta State) was not preoccupied with learning the latest Afrobeats lyrics like people his age would. Deeply interested in music, his interests lay elsewhere. The rising star was more interested in the alchemical fusion of Rock, Hip-Hop, and Soul that tragically-passed rappers, XXXTentaction And Juice WRLD, were at the forefront of. Something about the dark, brooding lyricism hinged on candour appealed to rapper. 

As he grew older and found his way online, he started to develop an appreciation for African music that saw him take his passion for music to BandLab where he started to experiment with intimate releases that found an audience online. In 2025, after amassing a following online, Strei was signed by KTIZO WRLD Records, teaming up with one of Nigeria’s left-field music companies. Since then, he has paired the elegaic expressionism that he picked up from listening to musicians like Shiloh Dynasty with an intuitive command of African rhythms that birthed his first project, ‘I.T.A.M.’

Imagined as an introduction to his inventive take on Afropop, it has set the stage for the arrival of a new project, ‘NIGHT,’ that Strei is describing as the sound of freedom. “The core concept of the project is freedom,” he explains. “The freedom you feel in the night. That’s how I experience it because there is nobody there. Everywhere is dark. No one is judging you. You can come outside, you can dance, you can laugh, you can express yourself, you can feel. That’s why I named it ‘NIGHT.’” Across the seven songs of the project, Strei is fluid and non-conventional, blending his sing-song flow with a easy bounce that shows that he’s in full control of his sonic direction. 

 

Our conversation, loosely edited, follows below. 

Where did music come from for you? Was it something you grew up with, or where did you pick up the interest from?

I grew up in Warri, Delta State, and I grew up knowing how to sing a little. So, obviously, I had a lot of people telling me I should expand more on that, but I grew my interest in music because of how it made me feel. I was very introverted as a kid. I was the kid who stayed inside the house. When I was alone, I used to listen to music, and it just resonated with me. It was something I wanted to do, something I admired. So I started doing it eventually, after more inspiration.

Do you think where you grew up had an influence on your approach to music?

I wouldn’t say my environment really impacted my approach to music, because my approach to music came from somewhere else entirely. It wasn’t even Nigeria. I didn’t start with making Afrobeats, and the people that inspired me weren’t even Nigerian artists. People like XXXTentacion, Juice WRLD, and Shiloh Dynasty. Those are the people who inspired me. So, it wasn’t really from my environment. My environment didn’t really shape me as an artist.

Would you say you grew up on the internet, since the people who inspired your music are Western-facing?

I guess a little, but not really. I didn’t actually get a phone until later on in senior secondary school, but the people I hung out with were older kids who just didn’t listen to Afrobeats. They always said it was what the cool kids did. They used to play a lot of foreign music, Rap, basically nothing Afrobeats. So, my tapping into Afrobeats came much later when I actually got access to the internet. It was mostly just the people around me.

Where do you live now?

I live in Lagos.

When did you move to Lagos, and did you move for music?

Yeah, I moved to Lagos for music in January 2025. 

What was the thinking behind the move? 

I got an opportunity, which was the record deal with my current record label, Ktizo Wrld. It was around 2024, after my WAEC, and I was just doing covers. I thought, if this music thing is going to work, let me just try it out and see what happens. Some of my covers started to trend, I did more, they kept trending, and Ktizo reached out to me. I saw it as a real opportunity to do what I actually wanted to do. So, I took it. We finalized everything later that year, and I moved to Lagos in January 2025.

Since you moved to Lagos, you’ve been releasing music constantly. What’s your process like?

There’s a studio in the building where I am, so I make a lot of music. There’s a whole archive. It’s just constant creation.

You also released a project last year called ‘ITAM.’ What does that mean, and what was your headspace when you made it?

‘ITAM’ stands for “Introduction to Afro Mood.” It was more of a mixtape to me, a compilation of covers I had done that we re-recorded and refined into a proper project, along with one original song that hadn’t been released before. The idea was to introduce people to the sound, to Strei. That was why it was called “Introduction to Afro Mood.” It was like, take this first, hold on to it, this is a sample of what’s coming.

What has the past year, since the release of ‘ITAM’ been like for you? What do you think that project has done for you as an artist?

It introduced the sound and brought more audience to me. I call my fans nomads. It just holds the fan base together, gives everyone an identity to place. This is how he sounds, this is who he is. That’s what that body of work does for me.

You’re close to releasing your next project, “NIGHT.” When did you start working on it?

I’ve been working on it for a while. Basically, after ‘ITAM,’ everything I was doing was building toward that project. But you have to understand that before coming to Lagos, everything I did was on BandLab. I had to develop my sound altogether. It was a journey of finding what works and what makes sense for Strei. There was a point where I felt the project was in a good place, but my team felt it could be better. That was around November and December 2025. The majority of the project was actually made during that period because I had found a sound that worked perfectly for it. So, we spun around and built something entirely new and better.

 

The project sounds very stripped down and mid-tempo. Was that a deliberate choice?

Yeah, I feel like that’s the perfect zone for my music in terms of tempo. It just gives the music space to breathe, and it gives the audience space to feel it. But there is some high-tempo music on the project too.

What do you want listeners to take away from ‘NIGHT?’

The core concept of the project is freedom. The freedom you feel in the night. That’s how I experience it because there is nobody there. Everywhere is dark. No one is judging you. You can come outside, you can dance, you can laugh, you can express yourself, you can feel. That’s why I named it ‘NIGHT.’ When people listen to this project, I want them to actually have the freedom to experience it fully because listening to a song on a bus, you won’t react the same way you do in your room. In your room, you’re probably dancing. In front of people, you’re just nodding your head. I want people to experience this project in that sense of freedom. I always do a lot of my best work at night, and I just wanted to express that freedom through this art form. 

Is there a specific song on the project that felt like a definite high point for you?

Every single song felt like a high point. I still struggle to pick a favorite because my answer keeps switching every day. The thing about this project is there’s something for everybody. Something you can dance to, something you might cry to, something you can relate to. Depending on how you feel, that’s what it is. The main point is connection. Every single song on this project is a song that can connect with you on a different day.

Listen to ‘NIGHT’ here. 

Interview: Mellissa Knows She’s A ‘Diamond Baby’

Posted on by The Native

During the final months of 2020, as the world came to terms with the restrictive COVID-19 pandemic, Ghanaian singer Mellissa introduced a fettered audience to her soothing voice, putting on an impressive showing alongside her sister MOLIY on “FEEL A WAY,” one of the standout cuts from Amaarae’s brilliant debut album ‘THE ANGEL YOU DON’T KNOW.’ Even though it was her first official credit, she held her own comfortably alongside two of West Africa’s most distinguished vocalists, before spreading her gospel further on her debut single “Limelight” and subsequent collaborations with the likes of BOJ and Ajebutter 22. 

After a brief hiatus, she followed up her debut single with a string of singles, including 2023’s “Me & U,” a slinky solo release buoyed by a flamenco guitar and sugary Afropop rhythms, “Henny Talk,” and the Blaqbonez-assisted “Tattoo.” Now, five years after her debut and a handful of collaborations, she’s ready to step into the spotlight with her first body of work, ‘Diamond Baby,’ a seven-track project that she describes as a collage of her different personal experiences. With help from names like Amaeya, Stonebwoy, and Joey B, she craftily navigates a sonic landscape that blends contemporary R&B with a distinct West African flair. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

What was your aim for the EP?

I kind of wanted to give myself full acceptance. You know, and that’s like even to my bad parts and my good parts. I feel like everyone has experienced something, and it’s up to you to pick and choose how that shapes your life. Like loss, for instance, it’s up to you to let it take you in a downward spiral, or you can choose to go up. I just wanted to transform my experiences, whether good or bad, and put little pieces of me in this project.

Does your film training influence your work?

I don’t think I do it intentionally. This is the first time someone has said this, even though I had the full awareness of it; no one has said it to me, so it’s crazy you said that. I think it’s storytelling. So, it kind of reflects in all forms of art. So, because I learned about it or have been trying to practice it in a different form, it definitely translates here in a way I didn’t realize while it was happening. But I do recognize exactly what you’re saying. It does sound like some Nollywood, you know, just the synths.

What’s your relationship with MOLIY like?

I miss my sister. She’s in LA right now. She’s my favorite collaborator. Every time we make something, it’s just another no-words kind of situation. It’s just beautiful, it feels so pure, it feels like it’s packed with the best melodies that you would hear. I’m really grateful that I even have that relationship. It’s one of those relationships you can’t replace, and I just feel fortunate that I was able to live this life and have someone with whom I have these things in common. We bond on so many things, and we’re just living and existing and making great stuff.

Do you love collaborating?

I love collaborating because I love making music, and there are some standalone songs, so you can definitely feel like my full essence. But I always feel like making stuff with other people, it just brings this brand new creation that would have never been there if it were just me. It’s like making diamond babies, I’m going to call it that because it’s like making something so fresh, something you would have never thought of yourself. So, yeah, I love collaborating. 

What was it like working with Stonebwoy on “Show Me”

I don’t really have words, I can’t lie, because he’s a legend. When we made the song, I was just like, “Wow, I wasn’t sure how he would hop on the song.” We were in the session together, so I saw his process making it, and it was so easy. I’m just like, “Wow, this song was meant to be exactly like this.” I enjoyed that session. I enjoyed listening to that song in particular. I don’t know if I’ve heard myself like that, like, and it’s one of the newest songs. So, it’s like a new side of me. 

What was the thinking behind making “Genie Baby”

That song is a big yearning song. I feel like people don’t make enough yearning music. There is a lot of importance in strength and just knowing what you want and making sure you get it. But it’s like, I’m just going to give into the feelings I’m feeling right now, and the feeling was, “I just want to dance with you right now.” It’s almost like you, and someone having an issue, and you’re like, “[Can we just] put a pause on that for a second. Can we just dance for a second?” Tomorrow we can go back to real life and pretend, you know, but right now I just want to dance with you. It’s a huge yearning song, but you wouldn’t even really realize it because the beat is just going.

What do you think is your mother’s influence on your career?

As far as the feminine energy, I feel like I got that from my mom. She has a very strong presence, and she’s kind but fierce. It’s like everything in one, in a perfect balance. I know it took me a long time, even to fully understand that and find my own version of it. But she’s definitely the reason I am the woman I am today in a way, her and God obviously. I would say my mom is a huge influence. She even had a restaurant by our house in Lapaz, where I was born and raised in Ghana. And she played music we listened to because it’s her place, right? So, it’s just a whole big medley of different kinds of sounds that I was exposed to for my whole childhood, and it’s a big part of why I make the kind of music I make. It’s why I make Afro-Sexy because she liked listening to sexy music.

What does it mean to have a global sound?

It means finding the things that we can all really and truly connect with, and just like making sure that’s fully embedded in the music because that’s what global is. So, breaking all those labels, barriers, and stripping all that down and finding that space that we can all just really and truly connect to that. I feel like my base is love. My base is just the courage to be fun and to have fun. Those are the things that I feel like would truly make a global sound because that’s what everyone would really tap into.

 

uNder: Best New Artists (April, 2026)

Posted on by The Native

One month into the second quarter of the year, music seems to be roaring back into life, but the underground never went to sleep. Since the beginning of the year, we’ve been treated to several standout moments and performances by acts still figuring out their path as creators and voices of their generation. As always, the underground is where the most cogent experimentation and hybridising is being done. It’s why we started this column years ago: we want to always be at the centre of what makes culture pop, and it’s a goal we’ve managed for a while yet and intend to keep doing. 

April 2026 has not been an exception in terms of the depth and breadth of talent that we’re aiming to spotlight. Whether it is the Nigerian rising firestarer, R33NZO, who is knee deep in the community of stars poised to take over in the coming months ot the Rwandan polymath, Angell Mutoni, these acts remind us of the pure zest and connectivity that music offers us. On the inverse, music can be a portrait of the soul, and the Ghanaian twin duo, BHADMAYORS, have shown that they have a lot to share with us since they rose to regional prominence in 2024 while rapper, The Creative Rae, keeps painting delicate vignettes of our shared realities. Together, this pool of stars reminds us of why we keep pressing play on records: we want to be elevated and seen, and, in some inexplicable way, these acts want the same for us. Read on and find out why you should be paying attention to them. 

BHADMAYORS

For Fans Of:  Black Sherif, Beeztrap KOTM, and KOJO BLAK. 

BHADMAYORS understand the utility of all seasons–good and bad–as well as the importance of living through them to get the message being offered. Their music is a living musuem to those experiences and how it continues to shape their views and perspectives on life, delivered with an almost-evangelical zest. Just two years into their professional career, the twin duo first took a step into music with a feature on BeFranky’s “Body On You,” displaying the nimble interplay between rapping and rhythmic crooning that would serve them in good stead for their breakout moments just months later with “Free My Mind,” a collaboration with fellow rising star, Alor G, that later received a remix with UK Afropop collective, NSG. 

Moving on from the heady success of “Free My Mind,” BHADMAYORS released “Move,” another party-starting invocation to live life to the fullest that closed out their breakthrough 2024. To kick off 2025, they linked up with Alor G again on “Lifestyle” as well as KOJO BLAK for an Amapiano-inflected heat scorcher that positioned them as leaders of the Ghanaian new music class. “Lifestyle” set the stage for their debut project, ‘The Good, The Bhad, The Terrible,’ a coming-of-age story that examined their path to being on the precipice of superstar status. On “No Concern,” they advocate for protecting one’s energy atop a brittle percussive instrumental that is predicated on their concerns about betrayals and backbiting. Late in 2025, they released “Narrow Road,” a song about taking a long shot that was followed by December’s “COUNTRIES,” a dedication to a love interest. 

Not ones to rest on their laurels, BHADMAYORS have released a new project, ‘PAIN MADE US,’ at the beginning of  April 2026, tunneling further into feelings like distrust, subterfuge, and predestination across eight songs. A solo effort,  the brothers sit with their feelings intensely across ‘PAIN MADE US’: there’s a roaring warning that their eyes are firmly placed on furthering their craft on “MONGYAI Y3N” as well as a terse retort to haters on “ALL FALL APART.” For all the consternation that animates ‘PAIN MADE US,’  BHADMAYORS  know that there’s so much good to come for them, as evidenced by them sharing that they have plans in the pipeline regardless of what life throws at them. Two years into a career that started with a song about embracing lighter times, BHADMAYORS are exorcising demons while trying to keep their cool still.  – W.O

 

The Creative Rae 

For Fans Of: LADIPOE, Kendrick Lamar, and Nasty C

When he’s not bending syllables into strange new shapes, The Creative Rae stays deep in the pocket of a beat, mapping out flows with the patience of a craftsman and the sensibilities of a Modernist poet. His scattershot stream of singles reveals an artist in complete control of his craft, both thematically and stylistically, doing everything within his power to summon every English literary device to do his bidding. His music leans into the elasticity of the contemporary Nigerian Pop sound while holding tight to the core principles of Rap.

2021’s “WYS” unmasked him as a dangerously smooth operator, the silver-tongued funny guy who’s so sly that you fall for him before you realise what’s happening. It also served as a premiere for the rapper’s mission: exhuming all his creative capabilities to charm and woo his listeners. On 2022’s “Nkechi,” the charming “lover boy” persona is exposed even further as he courts yet another love interest. On his recently released two-pack, “Flex” and “Chop Life,” he shows he’s back with renewed verve, delivering solid punchlines and rhymes that bounce off the walls with comic interjections. 

“Flex” is exactly what the title suggests: a near-flamboyant showcase where TCR stacks witty lines over Retrro5’s immaculate production. He grounds “Chop Life” in nimble wordplay and rhythmic detours. Hip-hop is electrifying when a rapper displays the ability to draw from various cultural references to signal taste and wit. Right now, there is frequent chatter about rappers being uncultured, but that doesn’t apply to The Creative Rae. On “Chop Life,” he parcels out lines like, “The music business is a mad house, got everyone in the coliseum.”

Every song introduces new schemes and flows that feel refreshing to our beleaguered ears. He carries an outlaw aura that attracts a fanbase shrewd enough to catch every punchline and fierce enough to treat them like heirlooms. The rapper is adept at using humour as a Trojan horse for heavier truths about ambition and the difficulties of the music industry, while remaining optimistic. This is the current thematic through-line of his artistry: surviving and thriving in Nigeria as a talented artist who refuses to be burdened by the weight of his supreme b skills. The music business is indeed cutthroat, and the pressure is very real, but TCR is not sweating it too much. As he shrugs on “Jaiye,” “my blow time is overdue, but we go meet for top.” – M.A

 

R33NZO

For fans Of: Psycho YP, Rema, and Kayode

A few weeks ago, R33NZO and fellow rising star scottyolorin released “FL STUDIO,” a thumping earworm that’s quickly helped springboard the Port Harcourt-born singer, rapper, and producer from relative obscurity to the vanguard of new voices shaping the trajectory of Nigerian Pop music. Powered by deafening drums and some floating synths, the single showcases R33NZO’s dual prowess in production and lyricism as he dovetails nicely with scottyolorin, who gives the song an added gravitas with his short but punchy verse. The track has gained significant viral success since its release, boosted by a remix featuring a verse from Champz. 

Before R33NZO started featuring on major digital streaming playlists and making promotional videos with Wizkid’s son, he was a visual artist and dancer simply trying his hand at music with friends. His first official release, “VILLIAN,” came in 2023, a dynamic debut that begins with a tranquil first half before transitioning into a hard-hitting trap-inspired second act, highlighting his proficiency in both singing and rapping early on. He followed up with another single, “ABOSI,” before releasing his debut project ‘renzoVERSE,’ a 5-track EP that includes a bunch of interesting ideas and standout tracks like the Ravington-assisted “XTACY,” but lacked the execution that has made some of his more recent work more compelling.

He began ironing out the creases in his style on subsequent releases like ‘STRANGE LIFE V1,’ which features “Lasgidi Spaceship,” one of the most interesting cuts in his growing discography, and “Fire/Xtatic,” a two-pack single that samples Olu Maintain’s 2007 classic hit “Yahooze.” R33NZO’s profile was significantly bolstered in the underground scene when he hopped on a freestyle titled “E don be (freestyle),” alongside close collaborators ARTSALGHUL and scottyolorin in late 2025. 

He carried the momentum that “E don be (freestyle)” afforded him into 2026, collaborating with more rising stars like Zen Univrse on the 3-track EP ‘#STRONGHEAD,’ and subsequently with scottyolorin on the bouncy “FL STUDIO.” The viral track marks his biggest moment yet, and he’s been building on it with new releases like “FELA,” while also being spotted with other artists in the studio working on new music. In a recent interview, he revealed that he’d like his music to help people. “I want my music to aid every human emotion possible,” he said enthusiastically. With his growing artistry and admirable work rate, his music will be the soundtrack to many different and unique experiences in no time. – B.A

 

Angell Mutoni

For Fans Of: Sampa The Great, Fimi, and Little Simz

Rwandan singer, Angell Muthoni, didn’t always plan to be a rapper, but her life and artistry have been engineered by multi-geographic settlements and a collage of experiences acquired across borders. She was born in Uganda, raised in Canada and eventually settled in Nyamirambo, the metropolitan suburb of Kigali, where Rwandan stars are being made.  Her earliest interest in being a singer came courtesy of her father, who was a musician himself, but when they relocated to Rwanda, and she began to perform spoken word poetry on stage, her interest in studio recording surfaced, and in the process of exploring it, she realised rapping was fun.

Angell Muthoni has been hard at work sharpening her g reputation as a rapper and poet. For her, rapping allows her to flex her energy, and it’s what she’s done all through her career. Her first single was a collaborative effort on “2011” with Rwandan producer and artist Darkency, who is now known as Denis Kanaka.  She’s been on a dedicated run ever since, with three mixtapes and three EPs to her name, including the joint project with producer Dr Nganji on ‘For Now’ and ‘The Rediscovered Collection’ that houses one of her most politically conscious songs, condemning all forms of oppression on “No Label.” 

The Hip-Hop artist has stamped her place as one of Rwanda’s most promising acts with the recent addition of a debut album to her catalogue. Released in May 2025, ‘The Delivery,’  melds elements of Pop and R&B with an unforgettable flow that is accentuated by her charismatic delivery.  Across 14 tracks, she meticulously assembled parts of her story from the solo opener, “Ousaahh,” the Kivumbi King-assisted party starter “Bounce,” and the soulfully introspective “Healing,” which points to the culmination of a journey that has taken many years to refine. As Rwanda’s music scene continues to grow, Angell Mutoni will be a leading force among the pack. – M.E

Unpacking Afropop’s Jewelry Evolution

Posted on by Boluwatife Adeyemi

A few weeks ago, Asake reportedly purchased a custom gold-plated Cleopatra ring and a second ring featuring Egyptian hieroglyphs for approximately $1 million. Decades ago, this would have been unheard of from a Nigerian star, but it underscores the economic power of Afropop today and the assimilation of a culture that was only reserved for American Hip-Hop icons many years ago. Just like the fast cars and designer fits, luxury jewelry items have become a definitive marker of success for African acts and also evolved into a primary medium of storytelling. 

 

In 2016, Meek Mill posted his flashy collection of luxury jewellery and diamond-encrusted accessories on Facebook, with an accompanying caption that read “TRAP TROPHIES!” As is often the case with the Philadelphia rapper’s social media activity, the post generated mixed reactions, with some commentators arguing that he was being excessively ostentatious, while others were simply bemused by the inventive caption. Showing off your jewelry as a rapper at this point is obviously far from a new trend. 

Long before  Meek Mill’s post, bling, ice, grills or whatever synonym has been coined for luxury jewelry items over the years, had always been inseparable from Hip-Hop culture. Meek Mill’s post, however, provided a unique, culturally specific framing for this established tradition that has greatly evolved since its inception. 

To understand why this framing is pertinent, it’s worth taking a quick dive into the history of Hip-Hop and the tenets upon which the genre was originally built. Spoken-word poetry introduced African-style oration to 20th-century America, and decades later, it would metamorphose into the rhythmic structures that define much of Hip-Hop music. Taking roots in the 1970s, the genre and surrounding culture emerged as an antithesis to the ritzy culture of the heavily commercialised Disco.

The genre’s commercial success started taking off in the early 1980s, right as Disco was declining. This is why Kurtis Blow, a young man from humble beginnings in Harlem and the first rapper signed to a major label, could confidently don several gold chains on the cover of his self-titled debut album. The genre began to put money in the pockets of these marginalised artists who had previously been excluded from mainstream financial prosperity, and the expensive jewelry emerged as a signifier of economic triumph and an aspirational emblem for the communities from which they sprung. Just like Meek Mill succinctly put, a trap trophy. 

As the years went by and the genre reached new heights, the jewelry items also became flashier and more symbolic. In 1985, Adidas struck a first-of-its-kind endorsement deal with Run-DMC, one of the most influential Hip-Hop groups in history, giving each member a 14-karat gold sneaker-shaped pendant. The iconic Jesus Piece chain, popularised by the influential Notorious B.I.G., later became a ritual for his friend, Jay Z, who would wear it while recording albums to commemorate B.I.G.’s death and seek inspiration. By the end of the 1990s, the genre and its accompanying bling culture had proliferated much of the globe.

In an excerpt from his book, ‘From Ojuelegba to O2 – The Story of the Afrobeats Generation,’ Ayomide Tayo highlights how the deaths of MKO Abiola and Sani Abacha shifted the collective consciousness of Nigerians as they sought a new reality and new forms of expression that would define their future. Hip-Hop and its powerful aesthetics filled this vacuum. “The pixels on the screen painted pictures of possibilities. Our minds were eager to escape the Nigerian contraption. TV was the escape. Radio too. And in 1998, nothing was blasting louder in mass media than Hip-Hop music.” Young Nigerians began to dress like American rappers, mimic their accents, and, importantly, adopt the aspirational narrative and energy that drove much of the music. 

While the early pioneers of the genre in Nigeria did not achieve the same level of financial success as their American counterparts, one of the symbols of that success, the flashy jewelry, remained a crucial element of that culture, continuing to represent a motivational ideal for a new generation. So when the money really started rolling in, coinciding with the global rise of African Pop music, the conspicuous display of wealth and luxury jewelry items became not just acceptable, but expected. 

When Wizkid, the quintessential Nigerian pop star, first broke out in 2010, his wardrobe and jewelry collection were initially modest, consisting mostly of rosary necklaces and other small handmade pieces. By 2013, his debut album ‘Superstar’ had already catapulted him from the crevices of Ojuelegba to national fame, and his jewelry collection began to reflect his growing status. It’s no surprise that in the video for “Jaiye Jaiye,” the lead single from his sophomore album, ‘Ayo,’ he had already swapped out the rosaries for gold chains as he sang: “Owo n wole wa / Seb’oluwa lo se o / Lagos today and London tomorrow / Seb’oluwa lo se o.” 

Over the years, he would continue to build a more significant, albeit subtle – compared to his peers – jewelry collection that reflects his growing, refined taste and astronomical net worth. His acquisitions have included a gold Starboy chain, several Jesus pieces, a “Biggest Bird” sapphire/diamond piece, a 130ct art-deco cross chain, which is reported to have cost about $1 million and a few other custom-made pieces. 

Conversely, expensive jewelry has not always symbolised economic triumph for Davido, who maintains a more elaborate relationship with these bespoke items. Considering his privileged upbringing, his jewelry collection has been far from subtle, but more importantly, it has held deep symbolic significance. His pieces usually serve as a way to express his identity, humour and personal narratives. Similar to how he flipped his hugely memeified Tim Westwood freestyle into an undeniable hit, his response to years-long jokes about his hoarse voice was purchasing an iced-out smoking frog from Icebox. 

The other pieces in his collection are equally symbolic: a diamond-encrusted DMW pendant made in honour of his late son, Ifeanyi, a heavy, Timeless piece ordered to commemorate the success of his fourth studio album, Baddest & 30BG pendants that flex words synonymous with his brand, and a recent huge, 1-of-1 Cuban piece acquired to celebrate his most recent album, ‘5ive.’

 

Newer stars like Rema and Asake have carried on this tradition of purchasing bespoke jewelry and are similarly expressive with their growing collection. Rema’s “Ornament of Ravery” is one of the more elaborate, unique and symbolic pieces to have been acquired within the Afropop space. It leans into his world-building ethos, a trait that helped him stand out amongst his peers. His other pieces are also detailed and symbolic, while Asake’s equally diverse collection, which includes his newly acquired custom gold-plated rings, a “Skating Soldier” piece and a diamond-encrusted money piece, reflects the continued evolution of jewelry as not just an emblem of success but as a primary medium of storytelling and self-expression within the Afropop generation. 

What began as a visible marker of escape from hardship has evolved into something far more layered decades later. Jewelry is no longer just proof of wealth or proximity to success; it is now its own language. Each pendant, chain, and custom piece carries coded messages about identity, legacy, grief, humour, and personal mythology. In a globalised music landscape where sound travels fast, these visual symbols, more often than not, now serve as an anchor for origin stories, grounding artists in their specific cultural trajectories while communicating their status to a worldwide audience. 

In that sense, Meek Mill’s framing feels more relevant than ever, transcending geography and genre. For Afropop’s leading voices, these pieces are not just accessories but glittering, wearable archives of journeys shaped by resilience and reinvention. As the culture continues to expand its global footprint, these pieces will keep speaking bolder and more personal stories that words alone cannot fully capture.

Joey Jaey Is All About Honesty On “Follow You”

Posted on by The Native

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. 

Inside Mautin Tairu’s Nollywood Talent Management Model

Posted on by Folake Ajao

The most important work in any industry rarely happens on screen. It often happens in the conversations before a project is greenlit, in the frameworks that determine which talent gets positioned for what, and in the long view that most people are too busy to hold. In Nollywood, that work is increasingly being done by a new generation of operators who understand that the industry’s biggest problem is not a shortage of talent–it is a deficit of structure.

Few people embody this shift as precisely as Mautin Tairu, founder of Guguru Talent Management and executive producer on ‘Mami Wata,’ the C.J. Obasi-directed film that premiered at Sundance, won the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Cinematography, and served as Nigeria’s Oscar submission in 2023. Sitting at the intersection of talent management and production, Tairu is thinking not about the next project but about the next decade. “I’m not just managing talent or working on projects,” he says. “I’m thinking about how everything connects. How talent is developed, how projects are packaged, and how they move beyond Nigeria into global spaces.”

 

Nollywood’s story has always been one of extraordinary output. For years, the industry ran on speed, producing more films per year than almost any other movie industrial complex in the world. The model worked on its own terms, but it was never built for longevity or global reach. What is changing now is the ambition. “For a long time, Nollywood was about volume,” Tairu explains. “But now, the conversation is shifting toward value and dominating our space on the global cinema stage.”

That shift did not happen overnight. The turning point came gradually, sharpened by his experience on the ‘Mami Wata’ festival circuit, where the contrast between how Hollywood talent was treated and how Nollywood talent was positioned became impossible to ignore. He found himself in rooms with Hollywood names, watching how they moved, how they were received, how the machinery around them functioned. He came back with a sharper question: “We have the same incredible talents everywhere. Actors, writers, directors, people who could stand anywhere in the world. But the systems around them weren’t designed to help them travel.”

That observation became a mandate. It was ‘Mami Wata’ producer Oge Obasi who first named the gap directly, pointing out that talented Nollywood actors lacked a clear framework for turning their ability into sustainable careers. Tairu took the challenge and found it mapped exactly onto what he already knew how to do. Guguru launched in 2021, and the proof of concept came quickly. 

“People were saying, ‘Oh, now we can tell there’s a management behind you,” he reflects. The referrals have not stopped since. Guguru’s roster now includes Uzor Arukwe, Omowunmi Dada, Uche Jombo, Adunni Ade, Najite Dede, Jude Chukwuka, Sharon Rotimi, and Kanyin Eros, talents who command both commercial and artistic attention across the industry.

 

The dual role Tairu occupies, talent manager and producer, is a deliberate design. Understanding production means you stop waiting for opportunities and start creating them. Every project decision carries a longer frame of reference. “If I’m working with talent, I’m also thinking about the kind of projects that can elevate them. And if I’m involved in production, I’m thinking about how the talent attached fits into a bigger, long-term trajectory of a franchise or a cinematic universe.” 

The ambition is careers that compound, bodies of work that travel, stories that represent something beyond a single box office weekend. Uzor Arukwe’s trajectory is the clearest illustration of where that model leads. He served as executive producer on ‘Three Working Days,’ participated in backend profits, and co-produced ‘Alive Till Dawn,’ the first zombie film in Nigerian cinema. 

Global positioning, in Tairu’s model, starts at home. “You have to first conquer your home turf before transitioning into a global brand,” he points out.“The value you bring from your home turf is what converts on the global stage.” A strong Nigerian audience creates demand among diaspora audiences, which becomes leverage in international casting conversations. Every step outward is locally earned first, informed by data, industry trends, and a close study of where African films are being consumed and by whom. 

The ‘Mami Wata’ festival run confirmed that the global appetite for African stories is real. Tairu watched audiences respond, watched the curiosity in the room, and understood that the door was open. But appetite is not access, and access is not sustainability. “Festivals, distribution, audience. Everything has to be part of the plan at the early pre-production stage.” 

Nollywood’s relationship with the global film industry is shifting. The adaptation of African stories by international studios, the growing interest from the UK and Hollywood in co-production, and the continued expansion of streaming platforms across the continent are all signs of real movement. But interest from outside is not the same as a partnership between equals. “Collaboration only works when both sides can offer each other value through a structured framework,” he says. Tairu’s role in that dynamic is a bridge, not just opening doors, but ensuring that when those doors open, the industry is prepared to walk through them with confidence and leverage.

That is ultimately the measure. Not whether a single Nollywood film screens at Sundance, but whether the systems exist to make that a regular occurrence. Not whether one actor crosses over, but whether there is a pipeline that makes crossover part of the plan. “It won’t be about whether African stories can travel,” Tairu says. “It’ll be about who built the systems that made them global.”

Tiwa Savage Music Foundation Awards  2.1 Million Dollars 

Posted on by Michelle Ejiro

Launched in February, the Tiwa Savage Music Foundation, in collaboration with Berklee College of Music, has completed the inaugural edition, awarding 2.1 million dollars in scholarships to 18 students. The program opened its application portal on the 10th of March, 2026, and during the course of five days from April 22nd-26th, 120 chosen participants accessed world-class training. 

This selection of burgeoning artists, songwriters, producers, and music executives experienced interactive sessions melded in Berklee’s faculty curriculum through workshops, collaborative sessions, and mentorship. Other experiential forms spanned live performance, songwriting, music production, and the thriving music business. 

 

In keeping with Tiwa’s vision for the music foundation to bridge the gap between talents and accessible learning opportunities, she was exhilarated to have achieved a mind-blowing maiden edition. “Seeing these young musicians take the stage at the National Theatre was a deeply emotional and proud moment for me,” she expressed.  “When we started the Tiwa Savage Music Foundation, the goal was to bring the world’s highest standards of music education home to Nigeria, and seeing 18 of our students receive life-changing scholarships to Berklee in Boston is proof that our talent is truly global.” 

The 18 students who were awarded during the ceremonial Finale received fully funded undergraduate placements at Berklee College of Music in London with additional access to the institution’s global programs. Other participants got graduation certificates, officially recognising them as the first graduating set of the Tiwa Savage Music Foundation. 

However, the goal remains bigger, according to Damien Bracken, the Dean of Admissions. “We are hopeful that this is just the first of many engagements and collaborations with Tiwa as we work together to bring Africa to Berklee and continue to positively impact the global music industry,” he says. 

Tiwa Savage is building a remarkable platform that can revolutionise how the young generation of African artists and music professionals view the art of music and the business side of it. For the 18 awardees, she became their beacon of hope, and that number is poised to grow larger over time and widen her impact. 

Kotrell Wants To Document Love

Posted on by Honour Aghedo

Rivers State has long been a forge for some of Nigeria’s most resilient musical exports, the home of high-octane Afro-fusion and artists who carry the grit of Rivers State in their cadence. It is no surprise, then, that Kotrell began his journey with this kinetic energy, rapping and dancing by the age of ten.

However, it was Ed Sheeran’s emergence that made him pivot to R&B and Soul. Watching Ed Sheeran perform with an acoustic guitar and woo the crowd, Kotrell wanted that. So, he started writing his own soulful songs in his room, taught himself to play the guitar, and, one day, decided to perform one of them. “The audience took turns telling him how the song made them feel,” he recalls. “When I used to rap and dance, the feedback would be, ‘Wow, I was so entertained.’ But with the soulful performance, it wasn’t about me. It was the fulfilment of making people feel something.”

 

Since then, Kotrell has dipped his toes into the R&B world with two EPs titled ‘Love is…’ and ‘Forever,’ released in 2023 and 2024, respectively. Still, he’s just starting, building on the acclaim that followed those projects with his debut album ‘And Everything In Between.’ While his popular song,“Now And Always,” established him as a premier balladeer of romance, ‘And Everything In Between’ sees Kotrell trading rose-tinted glasses for a mirror. He is not just singing about the “sweet madness” of falling; he is documenting love, heartbreak, healing and self-love.

“This project is the closing chapter of a story I first whispered into the world in 2023,” he explains  “Now, I return to it with a fuller heart and braver honesty. This time, I am not only singing about the sparks and the sweet madness of falling in love. I am telling the truth about what happens after the fireworks fade.”

One of the most striking moments in the project arrives on  “Deserve It,” a deconstruction of the manifestation of love in a decidedly Nigerian context. In Nigeria, there is a pervasive trope that love is only valid if it is endured through pain, and that “fighting” is the ultimate virtue. On “Deserve It,” Kotrell wants to dismantle that myth. “We have to acknowledge, accept, and constantly remind ourselves that we cannot truly say we know love if we do not first love ourselves,” he says. “Sometimes we become so focused on fighting for love from others and holding on to relationships that we fail to realise that letting go can be the very first act of self-love, and sometimes, that is the more important fight.”

 

By mapping the boundary between devotion and dependency, Kotrell also challenges the instant gratification that’s seeminly an intrinsic feature of modern dating. On “Love Me Slow,” he frames patience not as a delay, but as a litmus test for genuine interest, arguing for a return to empathy and patience.“If someone is genuinely interested in you, they will be patient because they believe you are worth waiting for,” he says. “I think we have to be intentional about showing empathy to the people we love. When we do that, we are better able to respect and honour each other’s timelines.”

Love does not exist without its heartaches, though, and on “Easy,” Kotrell and Amaeya detail the agony of a breakup, watching someone exhale while you are still suffocating. “After all of the things that we’ve been through, I carry you for head, and all of my shoulder/ My everything I been give you, You say you go ride for me now I’m a loner,” he sings. There’s pain and disbelief evident in his voice, and Amaeya’s response is sombre, her vocals sounding as if they were recorded through a veil of tears: “So hard to get back the day, If I could I’d be walking away, From the time and place we began, And make it easy for me too, But I’m holding on to lost patterns.”

When I ask Kotrell what he’d say to listeners who feel crazy for still caring when the other person seems unaffected. “It is completely valid to feel frustrated in a situation like that,” Kotrell says. “Love does not disappear the moment someone leaves. Healing takes time, and that is okay. The fact that it hurts is proof that your heart is capable of real love, and after healing, it will be able to love again.”

 

What makes ‘And Everything In Between’ especially resonant is the emotional safety it provides. It acknowledges that love brings out a childlike vulnerability and that everyone carries wounds that need dressing. “There’s no judgment for my scars,” Kotrell shares. “Safety in love is when two people intentionally create a space where each person feels seen, loved, and accepted exactly as they are, even while they are still growing,” he says. “It is found in the little things: the small compliments, thoughtful gestures, and quiet reassurances that remind you, ‘You can be vulnerable here’ and ‘You are safe here.’” 

There’s a grounded realism that refuses to be cynical. Even his definition of radical love is surprisingly simple. On “I Love You,” he insists on loving a person’s entirety, their mess, their history, their uncurated selves. While this may feel like an anomaly in an era of social media personas, for Kotrell, it is the baseline. “To be honest, I cannot fully speak on that because, from my own experience, it has never felt like a radical act,” he says. “The love I have grown up witnessing and the kind of love that inspires my music accepts a person fully, in all of their complexity. To me, that is what love is meant to be. I understand that not everyone has had the privilege of experiencing that, but I believe that is the way love ought to be.”

 

Kotrell’s music serves as a guide to slow down, feel the weight of your heart, and recognise that you are worthy of a love that doesn’t require you to disappear. For those still praying for that kind of connection, his advice is a reflection of the music itself: “Never settle because you feel pressured or afraid. The kind of love that is right for you exists, and you deserve nothing less.”

Listen to ‘Everything In Between’ here

How DJ Sholz Soundtracked Nigerian Modernism at Tate Modern 

Posted on by The Native

To close out the UK’s Black History Month in October, NATIVE Sound System brought its monthly party Till Day Break into the Tate Modern, programming a night that centred Nigerian and diaspora sounds within one of Britain’s most recognisable art institutions. In collaboration with Play Piem, and featuring live performances from British-Nigerian artists, Ife Ogunjobi and Strandz,  the intention for the night was to bring a distinctly Nigerian atmosphere into the museum space, to accompany the newly opened exhibition, Nigerian Modernism. 

That same spirit shaped the DJ mix filmed in front of Our Journey, where digital DJing, live percussion and saxophone merged into a performance that mirrored the exhibition’s own themes of synthesis and exchange. 

Rather than presenting a straightforward Afrobeats set, the mix was conceived as a live reinterpretation, layering multiple musical influences to reflect Nigeria’s long history of absorbing and reshaping global sounds. “The idea was to place Nigerian art inside a British museum and create an exchange of cultures,” Sholz notes in our conversation with him, where we dug deep about the way the sonic programming functions as an extension of the exhibition itself. 

 

This conversation has been edited slightly for clarity

How did your initial connection with Tate come about?

I’ve been going to the Tate for a long time. It is one of the largest art institutions in the UK. I had always known about the Tate, and I attended a Tate Late event featuring Little Simz, which was one of the best parties I have ever been to. One thing led to another, and a close friend sent me a message stating, “I know someone who works at the Tate and I will connect you.” She introduced me to Jesse, who runs the Tate Lates programme.

We spoke for some time, and she mentioned they were planning a Nigerian Modernism exhibition. I felt it would be valuable for The NATIVE to be involved because we’re closely connected to how the Nigerian story is being told globally. The exhibition felt like the right opportunity for us to contribute, whether through events, the content we have produced, or the Nigerian Modernism cover. We became involved across the entire exhibition. It came down to a degree of serendipity and chance. I appreciate when things happen that way, and I am excited and grateful for the opportunity.

 

Thinking back to your experience at the previous Tate Late, what kind of vibe were you aiming to create this time around?

For the parties, we wanted to bring our monthly event, Till Daybreak, to a wider audience. We programmed it with our friends Play Piem, a sound system based in the UK. The idea was to curate the best DJs playing the best club music and bring that energy. We featured live performances from Ife Ogunjobi and Sola Akingbola, both British-Nigerians. The aim was to bring a Nigerian atmosphere to the Tate and transform the space, and I think we succeeded. The mix came from a different place. My girl had been sending me videos of DJ mixes on YouTube, and it was inspiring to see people creating mixes in different settings. She showed me a video by Sundial Tapes, who recorded a mix outdoors in a crowd in an unconventional space, which was striking. I wanted to highlight the beauty of the Tate’s modern space while complementing it with African music.

Rather than doing a standard Afrobeats set, I wanted a live performance that juxtaposed digital DJing with live percussion and saxophone. The idea was to place Nigerian art within a British museum and create an exchange of cultures. We featured Sola Akingbola on percussion and Ife Ogunjobi on saxophone. I played tracks while we created live reinterpretations, so it felt like a performance that was constantly changing and evolving. It was an engaging experience. The goal was to blend as many influences as possible, reflecting how Nigeria itself has been shaped by global cultures while making them its own. With the mix, I wanted to create something distinctly Nigerian, slightly chaotic, ambitious, and still exciting.

How would you say the audience responded? Did you notice anything new in how people engaged with the music in that space?

Yes, absolutely. We had a live band with talking drums, and people really connected with it. It felt elemental and is not something you encounter everyday. Seeing people from different cultures respond to the talking drums and saxophone felt reminiscent of the New Afrika Shrine. I am glad we were able to give people that experience.

How important is it for you, as a producer and DJ, to ensure African music is represented on global platforms like Tate?

I think it is important to have a voice and to be part of a wider conversation. By presenting Nigerian Modernism at the Tate, there are many people who may have visited Nigeria or have Nigerian friends. Creating spaces where they can engage with our culture, and where Nigerians in the diaspora can connect with something they may have heard about growing up, can spark a deeper sense of connection. The more we inspire people to connect with one another and with our history, the stronger we become as a community. All of this contributes to building community, sharing knowledge, exchanging ideas and ensuring that our history is not forgotten.

Do you feel the work you brought to the exhibition spoke directly to its core themes?

The exhibition sought to showcase Nigerian creators who had rebelled against the structures of their time. As Nigerians, we are often in a state of rebellion, so by creating this mix, organising the party in this way, and pushing our art forms to new levels, I see that as a form of rebellion. It was also about coming together and allowing others to experience Nigerian culture in an authentic way. The more we present ourselves and invite others in, the more accessible and respected our culture becomes. If the aim is to preserve Nigerian culture and present it to as many people as possible, then we certainly made progress towards that.

How do you, as an artist, actively challenge the usual expectations or conventional frameworks around your work?

By not listening and just listening to the little voice inside you. When I say not listening, I mean not listening to the outside world. To be an artist, you need to have your own voice and your own internal validation system. It’s more about adding your own piece of thought or your own competence to what has already come before you. There’s been so much that’s been done and I’ve experienced so much. I was born in the ’90s. I’m a child of Hip-Hop. I went through gangster Rap, Trap, House, EDM. Everything I create draws on those experiences, translating what I absorbed when I was younger into something new and unique but it feels like it came from me, because it has a mix of all my influences.

 

What genres are you currently fascinated with?

Right now I’m really into the UK underground Rap scene, Nigerian Rap, Afro-House and Psychedelic music. I’m just listening to everything and staying inspired.

Looking at contemporary African creativity more broadly, what conversations do you think are still missing?

New conversations can be challenging, but it is important to encourage them, especially from underrepresented voices. Much of the arts has been dominated by the three major tribes, yet there is still so much more to learn. There are far more perspectives than we typically hear, and it is important to create space for voices that may not be widely recognised, so that new and less familiar ideas can emerge. A great deal has been shared with the world in recent years, but it does not represent the full breadth of Nigerian culture. Encouraging a wider range of voices can only strengthen and enrich that cultural narrative.

Native Sound System works very deliberately as a collective. Why was it important to foreground that sense of community within this exhibition?

You need a community to achieve anything. We have been organising parties with Native Sound System in cities such as London, Lagos, Los Angeles and Paris. Over time, we have built a following of people who want to experience and understand the world with us, and to grow through these changes together. Having a sound system means it is not centred on one individual. We can continue to invite more people into the fold and expand what we are building. That is the essence of a collective: to keep evolving and sharing our culture with the world.

Reflecting on the exhibition as a whole, what role do you think music plays in connecting audiences and ideas across continents?

Music brings people together. As a DJ, playing a song can give someone the confidence to speak to another person or create a meaningful moment in their life. In that sense, you can shape a small chapter of someone’s story through music. There is a real power in storytelling and in how people experience moments. At its core, the intention is to bring people together and create space for individuals to discover and express their true selves.

Sute Iwar and Raytheboffin Are Looking Towards The Future On ‘Modern Fantasy’

Posted on by Boluwatife Adeyemi

Sute Iwar and Raytheboffin have released a collaborative EP titled ‘Modern Fantasy.’ Following their collaboration on 2023’s  “THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE,” one of the standout cuts on Sute’s most recent album, ‘ULTRALIGHT,’ the Abuja-based musicians have reunited for six new songs, showcasing their seamless creative synergy. 

The duo initially teased the project earlier in the year with the lead single “Love & Rebellion.” Teasing the second single “Prime,” Sute revealed the project began coming together shortly after the release of his last album. ​​”He [Raytheboffin] sent me beats. I reflected. I wrote and performed the words. Sometimes they’re focused, and other times they meander,” he said. 

Built around a gameplay theme and Raytheboffin’s lush, intricate beats, other tracks like “Modern man” and “Mmmhmm” further showcase the duo’s established connection and even demonstrates a new depth to their combined artistry. 

Sute Iwar has described ‘Modern Fantasy’ as a pivotal project that signals the end of a phase for him. ‘After this EP, I don’t know when next I’ll be releasing new music,’ he said. ‘But you can trust that whatever comes after will be Jelí Music because that’s what I am.

Listen to ‘Modern Fantasy’ here.

Tekno’s New Album, ‘Where Did Love Go,’ Is On The Way

Posted on by Michelle Ejiro

Three years since Tekno’s sophomore album, ‘The More The Better,’ the singer is gearing up for the release of his next studio album. The album, his third. is due to arrive in June with his latest singles, “Bamboo” and “Press Button,”  providing an extensive glimpse of what to expect from the singer. 

Across his 13-year-career, Tekno has maintained a presence and grit that places him among one of Afropop’s earliest savants, supplying generational hits like “Duro,” “Pana,” and “Skeletun,” all electrifying records that catalogued an era of Afropop. “Bamboo” leans into that as a Dancehall track with hard-hitting percussions accentuated by his sonorous vocals. 

Written and self-produced by Tekno, he flexes his production skills that have soundtracked several Afropop hits over the years, including “If,” by Davido, and Kizz Daniel’s “Buga,” where he doubles as an artist. With “Bamboo,” his adeptness on both fronts syncs so well and accentuates his skill at going back and forth between genres. 

As a third album comes inches nearer, “Bamboo” and “Press Button,” are positioned to be the project’s intro, and it’s not far-fetched to expect more of his hypnotic dance bangers upon release.  

Listen to “Bamboo” and “Press Button” here.