KOLA

Lagos, Nigeria · b. 2000 · FARA Records

KOLA (Kọ́láwọlé Adéyẹmí, b. 21 June 2000) is from Lagos and he is not leaving. Twenty million people, the loudest and most ambitious city on the continent, and a place that has spent his entire lifetime becoming the centre of something — born in 2000, he has never known an Afrobeats that wasn't on its way up. He grew up inside the rise, in three languages at once: English at school, Yoruba at home, Pidgin in the street. He doesn't experience moving between them as switching. That is simply what a sentence sounds like there.

What got him was the talking drum. The dùndún doesn't accompany Yoruba — it speaks it, bending its pitch to follow the tones of the language so a drummer can say your name across a compound. He grew up knowing a drum could be a sentence and has never made a record that forgot it. A male tenor with a Lagos accent, cool and confident and completely unhurried, riding the pocket rather than working it, with sparse melisma and Yoruba ad-libs used as punctuation. Under him: offbeat guitar shimmer, deep melodic bass, a warm Lagos mix, amapiano log drums in the bridge, and the talking drum used as a lead voice in call-and-response.

Effortlessly cool and entirely without arrogance — Lagos cool, which is a specific thing: confidence that doesn't need to raise its voice because it already knows. He gives a crowd the chorus and then gives them the song, and by the last eight bars he's barely singing at all because they've taken it off him. That is the intention. Warm, certain, generous.