The death of Dolly Parton has brought an outpouring of emotion from across the world. It is not simply because another legendary musician has passed away. The reaction has been much deeper than that. Dolly Parton represented a set of values that survived changing generations, changing music, changing politics and changing ideas about celebrity. She […]
Fola has been getting the sticks from listeners for a while now. One of the biggest criticisms of his music is that he keeps singing about women while relying on a familiar flow that appears repeatedly across his songs. At some point, the conversation around him became that of an artist who had found one […]
There was a time when taking pictures with your lover was simply about preserving memories. Now, in the age of smartphones and social media, those pictures can become part of the relationship itself. Couples post each other online, send private pictures when they are apart and sometimes face unsolicited opinions from people who believe they […]
Niniola has built a career around movement. As one of the leading voices of Afro house, her music has always carried the energy of the dancefloor, combining African rhythms with her distinct vocals and a sound that makes standing still almost impossible. But Without You comes from a very different place. Following the death of […]
Ayra Starr has always had a clear musical identity. From the moment she released 19 & Dangerous, there was little confusion about the kind of artist she was becoming. She was the Nigerian girl with a distinct Yoruba influence in her delivery, making Afrobeats while comfortably moving into R&B whenever the music demanded it. The […]
There was a period between 2024 and 2025 when a wave of new Nigerian musicians began gaining serious attention. For a moment, it felt like Afrobeats was about to experience another shift as artists with unfamiliar sounds started finding their way into the ears of Nigerian music lovers. Artists like Dextiny, Serotonin and Fido were […]
Kunmie featuring Phyno is not the kind of collaboration many listeners would have predicted. The two artists operate from noticeably different musical spaces, with Kunmie leaning towards folk and Afro soul while Phyno has built his identity around rap, indigenous storytelling and street influenced sounds. Yet, here they are together on “5AM”, a contemporary Afrobeats […]
Since the release of Heis, Rema has increasingly leaned into a version of himself that seems less concerned with making conventional Afrobeats records and more interested in creating songs that explode when played in front of a crowd. That approach has worked. Rema has become one of the more reliable show stoppers in contemporary African […]
There comes a point in an artist’s career when criticism is no longer about nitpicking individual releases. It becomes about asking a more important question: What happened to the artist we once believed in? For Fireboy DML, that question is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Fireboy has built one of the more recognisable sounds in […]
Ruger has always been an artist who knows how to create a recognizable musical identity. From the mysterious lover boy image of his early records to the darker and more experimental sides of his music, he has built a career around sounds that are immediately identifiable as Ruger. But that identity has also become one […]
