The world first discovered Louddaaa’s artistry on Ayra Starr’s eponymous debut EP, where he produced three of the five tracks. “Away,” his first collaboration with Mavins Records, became Starr’s breakthrough, gaining over one million Spotify streams by April 2021 and establishing him as a force behind the boards.
His signature lies in the spaces between sounds: synths that drift like the morning mist of Lagos, percussion that falls with the gentle persistence of rain, and arrangements so delicate they seemed to float. On Starr’s debut album, ‘19 & Dangerous,’ Louddaaa’s evolution unfurled across five tracks: “Cast,” “Beggie Beggie,” “Lonely”, “Amin,” and “In Between.” By then, his work had blossomed, the beats becoming muscular without losing their supple grace, and the melodies flowing like liquid silk across each composition. Now, in 2025, the quiet kid from Lagos has found his voice.
Like many great artists, Louddaaa’s calling found him. Walking home from a church rehearsal at just eleven years old, he experienced what he describes as divine revelation. “God showed me that I was going to be a producer,” he says during our Google Meet conversation on a chilly Sunday afternoon in mid-July.
Born Kehinde Alabi, he grew up in Oshodi, Lagos, where he had his basic education. At age nine, his family moved to Ejigbo, the part of the city he would come to call home. A true Lagosian, he traces his ancestral roots back to Ekiti through his father and Osun through his mother. He’s one of three children—and a twin. Music wasn’t a profession in his household. As a child, he’d sneak out to church rehearsals to play, fearful of the punishment that might follow if his father found out.
At age 11, didn’t know what the term “music producer” meant. He simply knew that his destiny lay in creating music. The calling required preparation, and unknowingly, he had been getting ready for it since the age of seven. While his siblings attended children’s church, he would linger behind the drummer during services, soaking in the rhythms. Eventually, at nine, he took up the role himself, becoming one of the church drummers.
As he grew older, he added the keyboard to his repertoire, driven by instinct. “I’m the kind of person who likes to learn new things,” he explains, excitement audible in his voice. “Everything was just God preparing me for production.” It would take some time for the prophecy to come to pass because prophecies, even divine ones, require patience.
Louddaaa’s earliest musical influences came from home: his father played a lot of gospel, Apala, and Baba Ara, while his mother was a huge fan of Tope Alabi. Growing up, he gravitated toward artists like 2Face and Styl-Plus, D’Banj and Don Jazzy, who left a lasting impression on him. As a professional drummer throughout much of his young adulthood, he was exposed to a wide range of genres, learning to adapt his playing style for different artists and audiences.
In his first year at the Federal University of Technology, Akure, Louddaaa began telling anyone who would listen that he was a producer despite having never actually produced a single track. The universe, it seemed, was listening too. In his second year, tired of Louddaaa’s endless talk about production without action, a friend put a laptop in his hands. The gift came loaded with FL Studio, a software that would become his gateway to actualization.
That night marked the first of countless all-nighters spent hunched over glowing screens, crafting beats while his classmates slept. His hunger was insatiable. His makeshift production journey began when he salvaged a pair of old speakers from his dad and set them up in his school dorm. With nothing but earphones and those aging speakers, he started calling up friends who could sing, drafting them into his self-declared label. In 2016, he officially founded his record label, Tal Entertainment. Throughout his years in university, he visited local studios, absorbing knowledge through internships and observation.
Armed with an Industrial Design degree and an unfulfilled musical prophecy, Louddaaa graduated from school in 2017 into a world that had no immediate use for either. He found himself in Port Harcourt, interning as a sound engineer, still chasing the dream, just from a different angle. Then fate intervened. In 2019, he moved back to Lagos, and not long after, a friend forwarded him a job listing: Mavin Records was looking for a recording engineer. It wasn’t his dream of music production, but it was a door, and Louddaaa walked through it.
If you had told him then that he would one day craft hits for Ayra Starr, he would have laughed at the possibility. In 2020, he was simply the sound engineer who stayed late, making beats when no one was watching. He expected nothing in return. But the universe rewards persistence in mysterious ways. One evening, as Louddaaa lost himself in a rhythm that had been haunting him all day, footsteps echoed in the hallway. Don Jazzy paused at the door, drawn by the loop spilling from the speakers.
“Who owns this beat?” he asked.
“I’m just playing around with it,” Louddaaa replied, perhaps too casually for a moment that would reshape his entire trajectory.
Don Jazzy wanted Mavin Records’ newest signee, Ayra Starr, to try something over it. By the next day, she had, and history was quietly being written in that Mavin studio. His first collaboration with Ayra Starr never saw the light of day, but it did something else: everyone who heard it believed. “She started sending me ideas to help her make beats,” he recalls. At the time, he couldn’t fathom why.
This period of his life was Louddaaa at his most vulnerable: a producer who didn’t yet trust the title. No one had ever paid for his beats. His credentials consisted of a childhood prophecy and an ambitious university label. When the melody that would become “Away” first whispered through his headphones, he had no idea he was architecting his breakthrough. “I didn’t even know why Ayra wanted me to produce for her,” he admits, the bewilderment still fresh in his voice years later.
“Away” soared. It became number one on the charts, earning millions of streams locally and internationally, morphing into a cultural moment that transformed two careers simultaneously. For Ayra, it was stardom. For Louddaaa, it was validation on the grandest scale possible. The prophecy had flesh now, and the producer who once questioned his abilities finally understood what everyone else had already seen. “Away” was his creative genesis, not just the song that introduced him to the world, but the voice that said: You can do so much more. That voice has since become a roar, leading to collaborations with Afropop royalty including Davido, CKay, Simi, Ladipoe, and Lojay.
The origin of his name dates back to when he worked as a sound engineer at Mavin Records. Kenny (as he was called) preferred to keep his speakers at a modest volume, but the artists and managers around him wanted high volumes. “Kenny, turn it louder!” they’d urge, again and again. Louddaaa stuck, first as a joke, then as a brand. Now, a Louddaaa instrumental is instantly recognizable by his vocal tag and the emotional core running through the music. He calls his sound “soulful,” and it’s a quality that is traceable across his work.
But perhaps the producer’s most intriguing dimension is his growing intersection between music and film. “Film is my retirement plan,” he used to tell himself until a conversation with director Kemi Adetiba reframed that thinking. “She asked me, ‘Why make it your retirement plan when you can start now?’” The question stayed with him, especially since scoring films had been a long-held dream. So when director Afolabi Olalekan approached him to work on the score for ‘Freedom Way,’ it felt like destiny.
The score came naturally to Louddaaa, as Freedom Way draws from his own lived experience with police brutality. That personal resonance shaped the project’s emotional core. Since its completion, the film has premiered on prestigious international stages, including the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), the Red Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia, and a screening in New York. On July 18, 2025, it finally made its debut in Nigerian cinemas and is now available for public viewing. For his work on ‘Freedom Way,’ Louddaaa earned a nomination for Best Score/Music at the 2025 AMVCAs.
Louddaaa is part of a compelling wave of Nigerian producers and artists expanding their creative reach beyond the charts, venturing into film scoring and sound design. This cross-pollination of talent has been brewing for years. Take Falz, for instance. Known for his genre-blending sound, he’s also made a name for himself onscreen. His breakout role in Jenifa’s Diary earned him an AMVCA in 2016, followed by appearances in hit films like Chief Daddy, Merry Men, and 10 Days in Sun City. Tiwa Savage joined this cross-medium movement in 2024 with her film debut, Water & Garri, named after her 2021 EP. The project served as a visual interpretation of the emotions and themes embedded in the music.
For Louddaaa, the pull toward film is rooted in a desire for deeper expression. “Music and film go hand in hand,” he explains. “That’s why we shoot music videos, we’re trying to tell a story, to express ourselves.”It’s this understanding that positions him not as a producer dabbling in film but as a storyteller expanding his canvas, recognizing that some emotions require more than three minutes and a hook to fully unfold.
Today, Louddaaa’s father speaks of his son with pride, often referring to him as “the big producer.” “My dad carries it on his head now, literally,” he says, half in awe, half amused.
A typical day in Louddaaa’s life includes hitting the gym, working on music, and reading self-help books. “My favorite book depends on the problem I’m trying to solve at the time,” he says. It was while trying to navigate one of those problems that he decided—on a whim—to create a few ideas for Davido. At the time, he didn’t even know the global superstar was working on a new album that would become ‘Five.’ He sent the ideas to Davido’s manager without overthinking it. To his surprise, Davido liked them. “Next thing I knew, David started following me on Instagram.”
Louddaaa went on to produce “Anything” and “10 Kilo” on the album, both tracks carrying the signature elements of a Louddaaa production: emotive, featherlight, and breezy. There comes a moment in an artist’s journey when the work begins to speak louder than the name, and Louddaaa was honing in on that moment.
Louddaaa sees Nigeria’s distinctive sonic identity as a responsibility, something to preserve, evolve, and carry forward through both music and cinema. “It’s a blessing that I’m able to contribute to the evolving nature of African music and film,” he says. The future he imagines reaches far beyond mere music scores. “I don’t plan to wait a long time before directing films,” he says with the same certainty that once made him claim the title producer long before the world agreed. It doesn’t sound like ambition; it sounds like purpose, stepping into his next chapter. That sense of purpose has become his anchor, transforming what might otherwise be an anxiety-laced career into a stress-free one.
“I don’t enter a session to make a number-one song,” he says. “I enter to tell a story.” That distinction defines everything he does. The charts might applaud his work, but his heart is tuned to something deeper. “I don’t know how long this moment will last, but I do know I want to contribute something. I want my work to touch someone’s life.”
