Category: Interviews

A day before the release of YENA, Blxckie sounds like someone with nothing left to prove and plenty left to share. “As you can see, I’m relaxed,” he says. “You know, having fun.” For an artist about to release a sophomore album that five years of waiting have turned into something close to an event,…

Music has always had a peculiar way of bringing us back to what makes us human and helping us feel deeply. Not just the dizzying exhilaration of falling in love, but the quieter, more enduring expressions of affection: the warmth of being held, the familiarity of belonging, the tenderness of familial bonds, and the courage…

What brings a self-described reserved, laid-back young man the most happiness? For T Solo, the answer lies in creating music.  Born in 1999, he grew up on Music Africa after school and Michael Jackson CDs at home, and never planned on making music for a living. But once the singer in him emerged, he couldn’t…

“We are not selling tickets to make money,” Kayode Adebayo told me, about a tour whose cheapest ticket I found for ₦2,000. That sentence is either a smart way to fund a business or a polite way to explain thin box office, and the next four weeks will show which. The bigger question underneath it…

We inherit things we do not immediately recognise as our own; the cadence of a mother’s voice, a song remembered long after its meaning has faded, the particular ways we love, grieve, pray, and make sense of the world. Sometimes, it takes returning to where we come from to understand that these things have always…

Ayo Maff wears his heart on his sleeves, and pours it straight into the mic. So much so that his debut album opens with a vocal chop of a popular Nigerian influencer telling him to chill on sharing so much in his music, especially as a young artist. The 21-year-old Lagos-bred artist broke into the…

Afrobeats may be Nigeria’s greatest musical export, but beneath its global ascent, another cultural movement has quietly been gathering momentum. Across the country, a renewed appetite for music that carries the cadences of indigenous speech, the poetry of ethnic proverbs, the pulse of talking drums and the memory of stories passed from one generation to…

Dr. Babajide “Molo” Olanrewaju trained as a doctor. He also runs Greencamp, the non-profit talent incubator now heading into its tenth annual festival; styles artists under an Afrocentric streetwear lens; promotes events; and works as a data scientist, a discipline he says has sharpened how he reads the Nigerian entertainment industry from the inside. Raised…

This piece was submitted by a contributing writer, Ifowa Ajike. ru. is a firm believer in divine orchestration. “There’s just something about submitting to a will that is much higher than yours, smarter than yours, incredibly intelligent and also trustworthy,” she says. “It has never failed me yet.” I’m inclined to agree. Going off deep…