Next Afrobeats Star Season 1 Winner Brings 4 Original Tracks From TV to the World’s DSPs
Ultima Limited is proud to announce the release of Heat & Heart, the debut EP from Afrobeats artist Ayo Benzi. Released on April 8, 2026 across all major digital streaming platforms, the 4-track project marks the arrival of one of Nigerian music’s most exciting new voices and fulfills a promise made under national television lights.
FROM THE SCREEN TO YOUR SPEAKERS
Ayo Benzi is the winner of Next Afrobeats Star Season 1, Nigeria’s flagship televised music competition for emerging Afrobeats talent. Every track on Heat & Heart is an original composition, songs that were written, crafted, and performed across the competition’s run, now remastered and packaged for the world. This is not a compilation or a greatest hits; it is a fully conceived debut body of work, shaped under pressure and delivered with purpose.
The transition from television audience to streaming audience is a defining moment in any artist’s journey. For Ayo Benzi, it is the natural next step in a story that millions of Nigerians have already been watching.
Heat & Heart is an Afrobeats-forward project rooted in culture, texture, confession, and groove. Where most debut EPs ease listeners in, Ayo Benzi opens the door wide, four tracks that move between heat (energy, swagger, the tension of wanting) and heart (vulnerability, faith, the weight of what matters). It is the duality that defines this generation of Nigerian artists: deeply spiritual, intensely ambitious, and wholly themselves.
Lead single “Oil Dey My Head” sets the tone. Drawing on the imagery of divine favour and anointing, the oil that marks, protects, and consecrates, Ayo Benzi delivers a statement of faith wrapped in one of the most infectious Afrobeats productions of the year. It is the kind of record that plays at church and at the party, and sounds perfectly at home in both.
“Every song on this EP is a piece of me that Nigeria has already heard, but now it’s yours to keep. Heat & Heart is just the beginning.”
— Ayo Benzi
“Ayo Benzi did not just win a competition, he earned a platform. Heat & Heart is what happens when raw talent gets the time and space to say something real. We believe in these songs. Nigeria will too.”
— Femi Ayeni, C.E.O, Ultima Limited
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