Tobi Lou is growing into the artist he wants to be
“My goal this year is to be the best new artist"
“Ya’ll gat about, what time is it?… Ya’ll gat about seven days left to listen to ‘Non Perishable’, after that, I’m deleting it from the internet.” Those were the words the Nigerian-born, LA-based rap artist Tobi Lou spurted cheekily in a video he posted on Instagram, just after he released his recent 11-track mixtape, ‘Non-Perishable’.
The announcement threw his cult following into a full-blown frenzy. From wistful satirical videos on TikTok begging him not to delete it, to making the topic a top trend on Twitter for days, to getting the album into 3 categories on the Billboard, to helping the tape snag the top spot on the iTunes Hip-Hop Album chart. They moved mountains, shifted the needle of his career and asserted to the world how powerful the artiste’s loyal fan base is.
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I’ve been on a Zoom call for a little over six minutes, waiting for Tobi Lou to appear. I had been joined by his public relations manager and two other members of his team earlier, who had cordially exchanged pleasantries with me and assured me that Tobi would soon join us. A calmness hovers over the virtual nucleolus we share. As I look at their avatars transfixed on a slice of my Zoom window, I visualise them as menacing guards poised to pounce on me if I put Tobi in an uncomfortable situation. The same calm gives way to an eeriness—my connection tapers for a second, the tableau on my screen flickers, static filters through my headphones. Silence.
“Heyy,” says Tobi, his bass-inflected voice thunders through my headphones, bringing a fresh gust of vim into the room as the corners of his lips slowly fold up into a spirited smile.
“Yo! What’s up bro”
He apologises for being behind schedule while fiddling with his camera to get a good angle “Sorry for the lateness, my eh.. Zoom wasn’t working.” As for many of us slowly adjusting to the vagaries of a fast-paced post-pandemic reality, domestic life for the LA-based multi-hyphenate artiste has gotten tricky. Life has gotten especially tricky for him considering that he just dropped a mixtape. “I feel good, I think I’m doing so much right now, it’s hard to really feel things”. Just like most of us, however, he looks like he’s getting along just fine, at least judging from the slice of reality visible through our shared virtual window. Framed against the backdrop of a picturesque living room, he’s draped in a pastel-pink sweatshirt, which hangs low enough to reveal a svelte glistening chain adorning his neck. He dons an off-white cap worn to the back, which stealthily functions to accentuate his unconventional nature.
As I speak with Tobi Lou, it becomes obvious why he has amassed a ride-or-die fan base—he has the uncanny ability to weave words with astute dexterity, whether it’s through a conversation or the lyrics in his music. He welds words suavely to enrapture you in whatever offering he puts forward.
Tobi Lou has not always toed the music arc professionally. He used to be a talented baseball player, playing for the Joliet Slammers. But even then, he was always doing music in the background. After practice and in-between periods of respite from actively playing sports, he channelled his energy into music, splitting the limited time between woodshedding and actively making music. The career inflexion point for him came when he suffered a hamstring injury and was forced to give up playing baseball. Following this, music naturally became his prime interest. “I think the only thing that changed was that I no longer had any time constraints around like my job per se, I could sit at the computer all day and investigate music, experiment, make songs, make beats,” he tells me.
While this shift came with its perks for him music-wise, it also came with unforeseen baggage. For one, instead of the fixed schedule he had during his baseball days, Tobi Lou now had all the time in the world to make music, which meant he often found himself lost in the whirlpool of music-making, often forgetting to take the breaks.
His relationship with music, however, started at a young age. In grade school, he often wore the hat of being the class clown, stringing together cleverly fashioned cheeky rhymes to entertain his classmates. By sixth grade, he had recorded his first song. He speaks about this moment with a palpable childlike enthusiasm: “It was like magic almost, like the fact that my voice was now rapping over the same beat we would hear on the radio.” After this momentous epoch, he religiously started making music at home on his computer, tinkering with keys and buttons to make his music sound the way he envisioned it in his mind. This pattern of making music still trails Tobi Lou till this day; he finds it most comfortable making music from his home.
Even though he had pursued other interests, the way he sees it, he was born to make music and everything that played out, culminating in him becoming a musician were as a result of the seemingly invisible yet powerful hand of destiny.
In the mid-2010s, the sonic direction of Hip-Hop was taking a new turn, as younger artists were starting to lean towards more experimentation, shredding the standard rap rubric to shreds and putting it together in new inventive ways. It was in this period Tobi Lou had his big break, and in many ways, he encapsulated the zeitgeist of the time, with his avant-garde look, his Lo-Fi pixelated sound and his aesthetic informed by his nostalgic love for films and animated shows.
In 2016, Tobi made his debut with “Game Ova”, a viral single that racked in more than 1.5 million streams on SoundCloud. Pressed about how this single came about, his face takes on a spirited aura and he grows loquacious. He tells me how he got sent a pack of beats from a Detroit producer. While perusing the pack of beats, he liked most of them, but when he heard the “Game Over” sample, he was instantly enraptured by it. “I heard that sample from ‘Game Over’ from the Super Nintendo, and my eyes just lit up,” he says. He credits this moment as one of the key forces that shaped his artistic trajectory and defined his musical vista. Today, when people think of Tobi, they envision a suave blend of digital Lo-Fi aesthetics and sounds, and “Game Ova” was the start of this legacy.
Tobi’s art transcends rapping. Rap is the spiky piece of the iceberg piercing through the water, under the water is a giant mass buoying the iceberg. For Tobi, this subtle mass upholstering of his artistry, which functions to deliver the 360-degrees-Tobi-experience, comprises his genius outré production abilities, his cool conversational delivery style and his cutting-edge artsy visuals. These qualities mirror his strong creative personality. He started recording before producing, but early on, he got curious about music production and the holistic process of creating music from start to finish. He’d hear a sound or think of a melody and want to bring it to life, that gnawing yearning guided him into learning music production.
When he got more serious about making music, he quickly figured out that he was not the most prolific vocalist or the sharpest lyricist, production was a way to elevate his craft, engineer a unique experience and seer his brand on every song. Artist-producers like Kanye West and Pharrell Williams were among his mentors, and by effect, their 360-creative process crystallised the idea of being involved in the creation of a song from start to finish.
Scrolling through his Instagram page reveals an elaborate virtual labyrinth of enigmatic photos and videos such as tiles of bold avant garde visuals expertly superimposed against each other. It could pass off for a futuristic virtual museum in the metaverse. Pressed on this he says, “I always wish I went to an art school but I think in general—like I have two sisters, we’ve always had the craziest imaginations. I don’t think we needed any formal training, I think the only thing we needed was to grow, and this is what everyone needs—to grow into the type of artist they’re gonna be”.
Tobi is very conversational, we’ve been talking for over 30 minutes, and he’s been very open with me, replying to my questions with affable vim. He provides elaborate replies to my questions, while punctuating the session with spirited laughs, elaborate gesticulations and occasional pauses to gulp his bottle of water. This astute conversational dexterity bleeds into his music, on every song, he paints a vivid picture with his characteristic casual conversational tone, paired with accentuating sound effects and a fitting production.
“One of the first things I learned when I came out to LA from Chicago, I was sitting in like meetings and sessions with producers, A&Rs and stuff like that, and a lot of it was pop-based sessions, and they taught me how to speak in a pop formula,” Tobi tells me of a period in his learning curve. “That the things I’m trying to say shouldn’t be hard to reach, think about how you talk to somebody, some of the things that we’ve said in this conversation can be used as lyrics.”
Tobi Lou just put out his third project, a mixtape which he cheekily dubbed ‘Non-Perishable’. The project has earned him the biggest commercial reception since the start of his music career. “You know, I wish I could say I planned it,” he says of the project. ”I don’t know what triggered it, I just know the thought came to me. I always wanted to drop a project out of the blue but I don’t have enough awareness to do that, and it finally got through my head that, ‘hey! you can’t just be an artist you have to market yourself.’”
“Non-Perishable came about in a different way than any other tape, or project that I’ve released because with the other projects, I knew I was working,” Tobi Lou says of the spontaneous process for the mixtape. “Like, say on ‘Live On Ice’, which I released in 2019, I knew I was working on it. ‘Non-Perishable’ is the only project I didn’t know I was working on. I was actually working on another project called ‘Perish Blue’, and a lot of it took place over 2020 and 2021. That project was so deep and emotionally draining that I was exhausted, and I made a whole different bunch of stuff that didn’t make the album. I just remember talking to my sister, because I make so many different styles of music, and ‘Perish Blue’ was kind of long and had so many different styles. She’s just like ‘Yo! What if you just focused on giving people an organised, put together energy, for each project?’ So when she said that, I was able to take a lot of the fat off of ‘Perish Blue’ and then I realised I had three projects and ‘Non-Perishable’ is the one that I just released.”
At this point, he starts looking jaded and reaches to his bottle for a huge gulp of water. I make mental notes and start preparing to roll the curtains. Instead, I somehow steer the conversation into a more sunny arc and talk about how excited I was, when I heard his collaborative effort with fellow first generation Nigerian-American artist Chika. His face lights up and he gives off a wide smile, struggling to control his mirth. I ask him if he has plans on working with Nigerians in the future. “Yeah, definitely! It’s kind of long overdue, and it’s something I’m excited to do”.
The conversation gets breezy and relaxed, so I press on.
“If you could work with any Nigerian artiste from the entire talent pool we have for now, who would it be?”
“I’ve always wanted to work with Wizkid because I think he is such a pioneer, but then I heard Tems’ voice and I just kind of fell in love with her voice. I’m a producer, so I imagine people in different sonic environments. If you put me in a session with Tems, oh my gosh! I just would imagine what would come from it. I would say it’d have to be a tie between Wizkid and Tems. But I have respect for all Nigerian artistes because they’re all doing something different. If I end up being in a session with Santi, that is a win in itself, cos it’s something new and different coming from that.”
Tobi is still loquacious, speaking passionately about how vibrant the Afropop scene is now, but he looks visibly tired, so I hint at the interview drawing to a close. For a few seconds, he pauses to catch his breath. Seeing him still, as soft amber-hued light filters creamily through the window behind him, I’m struck by how he is as much a genius in real life as he is in his music.
He tells me about his plans for the year. In a couple of months, he’ll be touring in the fall, rolling out more music videos, he also plans on rolling out three more projects this year. He announces with brazen confidence “My goal this year is to be the best new artist, to be like when you look up and say ‘what happened this year?’, and like, all that happened was, every time someone looked up, I was there.”
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NATIVE PREMIERE: Rigo Kamp Runs Ahead Of The Pack With The Visuals For “Marathon”
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Last Friday, Rigo Kamp, a NATIVE uNder alum and one of the architects of an equal parts nostalgic and refreshing sound released his self-titled debut EP, delivering a propulsive fusion of Alte, R&B, Funk, and Soul-infused rhythms.
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Just last November, Apple Music named Rigo Kamp as its Up Next artist, an acknowledgment that underscored his potential and confirmed what the tastemakers and underground scene already knew. Weeks later, he delivered an exhilarating live set for Spotify Fresh Finds in Lagos, proving he’s just as compelling live as he is in the studio.
On “Marathon”, the refreshing opener to the Rigo Kamp EP, Rigo borrows the bounce and swagger of Afro-Juju legend, Sir Shina Peters’ golden-era, fusing nostalgia with re-imagination to birth a vintage performance that feels like a private party for two, where it’s just Rigo, and you.
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The SA house music pioneers are back with a deeply moving and rhythmic new release.
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Over the years, Black Motion has partnered with brands like Ballantine’s, Sony Xperia, and Coke Studio, and they are looking to partner with more under their new label Intascore, expanding their influence beyond music. With a combined social media reach of over 2.2 million followers, their music resonates with audiences worldwide, uniting people through rhythm, culture, and movement.
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A little over two weeks after the release of his first project of 2025, Kemena and I sat down to discuss the joys of creating art, the clarity that powers ‘888,’ and the freedom he found in surrendering to his path. Even though we were speaking virtually, his presence feels steady. He is speaking with the quiet confidence that defines his music–intentional yet fluid, deeply personal yet resonant. Over the years, his artistry has evolved, shaped by a desire for creative independence and the pressures of an industry that often demands compromise.
With ‘888,’ Kemena has reclaimed his space. The project neither chases the mainstream nor rejects it; instead, it exists on its terms, rooted in self-assurance. Across seven tracks, he weaves through stories with a sharp lyrical style and layered production, a testament to an artist fully in tune with his craft. In many ways, ‘888’ feels like an arrival—not to the commercial peak the industry might expect, but to something more valuable: a place of artistic certainty.
Standout tracks like “Rainy Day” and “Bola” remind you that Kemena is a storyteller in more ways than one. On “Rainy Day” he flexes his production prowess but the summery vibe of the song does not blunt the sentimentality of his lyricism. With “Bola,” Kemena taps into his element, deploying witty puns and his brilliant approach of social commentary and “I’m not mad, just hungry” is as relatable as it is envy-worthy—to be so intertwined with a lover that they can complete your lines.
Totaling seven tracks with a runtime of 16 minutes, ‘888’ is brief but expansive, a collection of ruminative thoughts, nimble melodies, and declarations of self-assurance. There is no hesitance in Kemena’s voice when he speaks about the album, no lingering doubt about whether he made the right choices, which is the same confidence he’s communicating in “You don’t need me”. ‘888’ is the product of someone who knows who they are and, more importantly, knows that they do not have to prove it to anyone. From the powerful declaration of “I Will Never” to the easy groove of “Evelyn’s Vibration,” the album takes you on a journey. It is a return to himself, a rekindling of the mindset he had before industry expectations clouded his creative instincts. It is also reminiscent of ‘Bond,’ the project that first put him on the radar of music lovers.
“I made ‘Bond’ as a student,” he reflected during our conversation. “I wasn’t trying to be anything. I just wanted to make music. And then all of a sudden, people started calling me—people I never expected. That was how I got into songwriting for other artists. But somewhere along the line, I forgot what it felt like to make music just because I wanted to.” When I asked him how he found his way back, his answer was certain: “I stopped overthinking. I just made what felt right.”
Our conversation, lightly edited, follows.
‘888’ just dropped. How are you feeling?
I feel cool. It’s been nice. I feel like a celebrity, to be honest. I’ve done a couple of interviews already, and I feel like I’m saying the same thing over and over again. But that’s a good thing, right?
‘888’ feels different from ‘Guitars and Malaria.’ Did you approach this project differently?
‘888’ feels like me making music the way I want to again. With ‘Guitars and Malaria,’ there were a lot of industry conversations and people saying, “Work with this guy, collaborate with that person, do this to make the music more commercial.” I don’t regret making that album, but looking back, I think I was trying to fit into something instead of just being myself. I wouldn’t say I lost myself completely but, I lost the balance between the business and my authenticity. I started to feel like my music wasn’t valid unless it was getting industry attention. And for a while, I was chasing that. I was doing what I thought I should be doing, instead of what I wanted to do. I had to learn that I’m probably a project artist. I needed to stop feeling like my music wasn’t enough just because it wasn’t ‘blowing up.’
I started thinking about why people liked ‘Bond’ and, back then, I wasn’t overthinking it. I was a student just making music because I loved it. I wasn’t trying to force anything. But then, suddenly, things started happening—I started getting calls from people I never expected. That’s actually how I got into songwriting for other artists. People in the industry heard ‘Bond,’ reached out, and asked me to write for them. And before I knew it, I was deep in that world. But in the process, I started to forget what it felt like to just make music for me.
Was there a specific moment that made you realize you needed to return to that authenticity?
Yeah. At some point, I just stopped overthinking. I realized [that] I didn’t have to prove anything to anyone. I didn’t have to chase industry validation. I could just make what felt right. That’s where ‘888’ came from.
One of the things that stands out about your music is how it feels both deeply personal and universally relatable. Do your lyrics come from lived experiences?
Not exactly. I think the way my music is put together—the energy, the emotions—is influenced by what I’m going through at the time. But the actual content? Almost none of it comes from my personal life. I don’t write songs like, “Oh, this happened to me, let me put it in a song.” Instead, I take a feeling, a perspective, or something I’ve observed and build a fictional story around it. I also like humor. I like to be witty, to play with words in a way that feels natural but unexpected. That’s always been part of my music.
That makes sense. Your lyrics often have a layered meaning like they say one thing on the surface, but there’s a deeper story underneath.
Exactly. I like to phrase things in ways that make people stop and think. I want someone to hear a line and go, “I’ve thought about this before, but I never knew how to put it into words.” Or sometimes, I just want the music to feel good. It doesn’t always have to make sense, it just has to resonate.
Would you say that’s why artists like Omah Lay and Jon Bellion resonate with you? Because they do something similar with their songwriting?
Yes! Jon Bellion especially. His music is almost like sermons sometimes. He says things in a way that makes you pause and reflect. Like in “Conversations with My Wife,” when he sings, “What if all the things I’ve done were just attempts at earning love? Cause the hole inside my heart is stupid deep” That’s the kind of songwriting that gets to me. That’s such a simple way to express love. He could have said it in a hundred different ways, but he chose that one. That’s what I admire. Not just what they’re saying, but how they say it.
That approach is very present in your music, especially in ‘888.’ What’s your favorite lyrical moment on the album?
It’s a conversation. It’s not one person talking. On ‘I will never,’ there’s this part where one voice says, “The things you want for me, I want it too. The things you like for me, I like it too.” And then another voice—almost like a god-like figure—responds: “Hope you know that I would never say something I don’t mean.” That moment feels special to me. It’s basically a prayer, but I don’t like to box my lyrics in, I keep it open-ended.
With the album it feels like you weren’t just making music but you were reclaiming something. Would you say this project is a turning point for you?
Yes, I think so. It’s not my first turning point, though. ‘Bond’ was the first one. ‘Bond’ was the project that put me in rooms I never expected to be in. Before that, I was just a student making music. Then, suddenly, people were calling me—people I respected. That was how I got into songwriting for other artists. But then, in trying to navigate that world, I lost a bit of myself. ‘Guitars and Malaria’ was me trying to find that balance, and ‘888’ is me realizing that I don’t have to balance anything, I just have to be.
You’ve mentioned that you’re at peace with not chasing commercial success. Is there a part of you that wants mainstream recognition?
If it comes, great. But I’m not going to force it. I know how the game works. I’ve written for big artists, so I know the kind of songs that work in that space. And if I wanted to, I could sit down and make those songs. I could make music that fits neatly into what’s trending. But that’s not why I do this.
Does songwriting for other artists help you keep your music pure?
Yes! That’s a big part of it. Since I also write and produce for other artists, I don’t have to rely on my music to pay my bills. That takes a lot of pressure off. It means I can release what I want, when I want, without thinking, “Will this chart? Will this go viral?”
That freedom must be refreshing.
It is and it’s why I don’t overthink my releases anymore. I’m constantly creating. So when something feels ready, I put it out. I don’t have to wait for industry validation or the “perfect” timing.
What does that mean for the future? More projects?
A lot more. I’ve realized that my way forward is to just keep giving. The Lord has put me in a position where I can create without stress, so that’s what I’m going to do. No long breaks. No holding back. I’ll just keep releasing.
What is the biggest takeaway from ‘888’ for you?
That you don’t have to force anything. Whether it’s love, creativity, or success—what’s meant for you will come when you’re aligned with yourself. And if you have to fight too hard to keep something, maybe it was never really yours to begin with.
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