From Mr Eazi and MOLIY’s Ghana-Nigeria conversation to Terry Apala’s reworking of Apala, DopeNation’s Ghanaian rhythmic vocabulary and a new generation of street-pop and rap voices, this week’s Afrobeats Heat Different finds African music moving forward without becoming distant from where it came from. African pop does not have to abandon its old musical languages…
East Africa is beginning to sound less like separate national music industries and more like one connected market. Spotify’s Global Impact List for the first half of 2026 offers a clear sign of that shift. Four of the five leading East African collaborations on the list bring together artists from different countries, while the fifth…
For weeks, Solana Tii has been doing something deceptively simple: showing up for her music. Across a steady stream of videos and social posts, the Nigerian artist has continued introducing audiences to her sound, performing it, explaining it and repeatedly carrying the language of Yorupop into public view. Now, according to the singer, that persistence…
After a run of major releases and collaborations, BNXN opens another chapter with Still In Charge, a six-track EP that sees the Grammy-nominated Nigerian Afrofusion artist embrace a more energetic, carefree side of his sound. Released via EMPIRE, the project follows his No. 1 sophomore album, CAPTAIN. It brings together previously released records with new…
Discovery culture has developed a strange obsession with being first. With Custodian Gems, we find the artist before everyone else. Catch the song before it moves. Name the next star before consensus arrives. But discovery becomes far more useful when it stops behaving like prophecy. The more interesting question begins after an artist has our…
Six years after For Broken Ears and a decade after “Mad Over You”, Spotify ’s Lagos showcase asks a bigger question: what keeps older Nigerian records culturally alive? There are songs you remember, and then there are songs that remember you. Runtown’s “Mad Over You” belongs to the second category. For many listeners, the 2016…
Nairobi’s R&B scene for years has had the talent but lacked the structures needed to move artists from local discovery to sustainable international careers. That gap pushed people such as Faiza Hersi to build those structures from the ground up. Her work began with Nairobi R&B, an event platform that emerged in 2019 when R&B…
Davido did not go to Times Square to sing. He went to stand beside a billionaire, beneath a message that had nothing to do with music: “Made in Nigeria. Built for the World.” No stage. No setlist. No crowd chanting his name. Just a Nasdaq billboard, a refinery IPO, and two Nigerian men who have…
Tiwa Savage arrived in Malawi expecting to cry. She had prepared herself for it. As she later recalled, she had even packed extra tissues because she expected the stories of women and girls who had experienced violence to overwhelm her. Instead, after spending four days meeting survivors, activists, students, creatives, government officials and representatives of…
Across cinema, music, literature, fashion, food and art, the second edition of MAMA AFRICA offered something more consequential than another European celebration of “African culture”: a meeting point shaped around Africa’s Portuguese-speaking cultural worlds and the diasporic city they have helped build. African culture has never spoken in one language. Yet as African music and…
