Latest news with #Obongjayar
ABC News
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
soul ctrl: burn the candle both sides
Tanya's keeping it chill on soul ctrl - just a couple of mates of the show dropping by and tracks that will take you with a sea breeze between Jamaica, Somalia, the States and Australia... One of the special friends is Obongjayar from the UK to talk about the fun, partying & frustrations which molded his latest album. Plus, Cee Caton who you'll know from jumping behind the soul ctrl mic from time to time to chat about some music she's been loving... Love the show and want to get your track a first play on soul ctrl? Send your music (with a download, artist name & release date) to me here! (Subject: soul ctrl - *Your artist name*) Spotify Playlist Apple Music Playlist
The Guardian
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Little Simz & Chineke! Orchestra review – rap-classical crossover is spectacularly realised
Not many can say that they've reloaded a symphony orchestra. But as the Southbank Centre erupts after the opening horns of Gorilla, Little Simz has to run it back, starting the track again in the manner of a rowdy club set. Backed by the majority Black and ethnically diverse Chineke! Orchestra and her own live band, Simz – closing out the 11-day Meltdown festival which she curated this year – performs a set that is equal parts genuine and genius. The energy in the room is overwhelming, overcoming any misgivings about performing to a seated crowd. Songs of contrasting styles are played one after the other, to highlight the malleability not only of Simz as a performer but of the combination of the live band and orchestra. Young, with post-punk production and Mike Skinner-esque rapping, topples into Free, which is soulfully stripped back. The string players create a frantic, horror-film atmosphere for Thief and Flood, but immediately after, serve to make the 'I love you' on Two Worlds Apart far more tender. This extends to word painting: on Introvert, the flutes invoke a choir ('I see sinners in a church'); vibrato strings mimic a voice trembling and breaking on Lonely, the raw, vulnerable track about her internal struggle with producing new album Lotus. Joining her are Miraa May for Peace, longtime collaborator Obongjayar for Lion and Point and Kill, and Wretch 32 and Cashh for Blood. For the latter, Wretch emerges from the crowd and walks down through the stalls, clever staging since the song is structured as a phone conversation, forcing the audience to look between the two rappers like watching a tennis match. At points, Simz feels larger than life, spectacular, replacing conductor Chris Cameron at the helm of the Chineke! Orchestra during Venom, rapping while facing the ensemble until the chorus, to frantic lights. Yet she's chatty between songs, strolls the aisles during Heart's on Fire, and stands beaming like a schoolgirl soaking in minutes-long applause. The whole experience is perfectly orchestrated – in every sense of the word.
Yahoo
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Meet Obongjayar, the Afrobeat Innovator Who Can Rock a Stadium With No Fear
You wouldn't quite call Obongjayar a rapper today, but back in 2016, he caught the eye of Richard Russell — the influential British producer who helped launch Adele's career and heads the indie label XL Recordings — with a freestyle over Kendrick Lamar's 'u' from To Pimp a Butterfly. The song had been a breakthrough for Obongjayar, one where he began to untangle some identity crises from his youth in Calabar, Nigeria to his young adulthood in London. Born Steven Umoh, he took on the name Obongjayar as he began to drift away from hip-hop, putting together Obong — the word for 'king' or 'god' in Ibibio, his local language — with Jayar, a play on being a junior, named after his father. He liked the way the name combined the power of a ruler and the humility of a son. Since his 'u' freestyle, he leaned even more into multiplicity, wielding electronic music, rock, soul, and even country into a sort of new-age Afrobeat of his own making. You can hear remnants of Afrobeat icon Fela Kuti's innovation and defiance in songs like 'Message in a Hammer' from his expansive 2022 debut album Some Nights I Dream of Doors, which he wrote after Nigerian security forces shot at anti-police-brutality protesters in 2020. You can also hear a softer side across Doors and his four EPs, too. Though he's retained a rapper's bravado and way with words, he sings in a grovely croke as well as he does in an airy falsetto. His chameleonic approach has earned him a dedicated fanbase and one of the U.K.'s esteemed songwriting awards, an Ivor Novello. In November, he will headline his biggest show yet, at London's O2 Kentish Town Forum, to support his sophomore album, Paradise Now, out May 30. More from Rolling Stone Meet Lily Seabird, an Unflinching Songwriter Who'd Make Leonard Cohen Proud How Lifeguard Unleashed the Melodies Inside Their Punk Noise Meet Haute and Freddy, the Carnival-Pop Duo Blurring Centuries and Breaking Rules As a testament to his range, he's also earned a fan in coveted dance producer Fred Again…, who remixed Obongjayar's gentle ode to his younger brother, 'I Wish It Was Me,' into the joyous new track, 'Adore U.' Obongjayar had gone from being a stranger to Fred, moved to tears watching a set of his online, to performing 'Adore U' with him at a sold-out stadium, Los Angeles' Memorial Coliseum. Despite the massive crowd, he felt at ease. 'I don't get nervous because I know what I'm doing,' he says. 'I know who I am. I don't need to put on a thing, I'm not performing. I'm just being, because I love the songs.' He wasn't always so self-assured. When Obongjayar first started posting music to SoundCloud, he was making 'terrible American rap,' he says, trying to be someone he was not. 'If you grew up in Nigeria when I grew up in Nigeria, everyone had that identity crisis,' he says, having moved to London around 17 years old. His mother had left Nigeria for England after an abusive relationship with his father, leaving Obongjayar and his younger brother in their grandmother's care until she was able to bring them over. 'We were so fed American culture — American movies, American music, watching Jerry Springer, Cartoon Network — that being Nigerian was almost not as cool. What was seen as cool at that time was kids who had parents in America, kids who went to America for holiday. I didn't have any of those things, but I was around kids who did, so I used to lie a lot. When we would go back from school holiday, me and my brother would lie through our teeth that we'd been to England. We put on a fake accent, but our accents were American accents,' he says. Though he had stumbled upon a Fela Kuti bootleg CD as a child, he was more interested in 50 Cent, Kanye West, and Lil Wayne. He didn't really appreciate Kuti until he was a graphic design student at Norwich University of the Arts in the east of England. His British friends, who played the Nigerian bandleader around Obongjayar, wrongly assumed he already knew all about him. 'When you're in a different place and you see how revered someone like a Fela Kuti is, you realize how important it is, him being as uniquely himself as he was across any geography,' says Obongjayar. 'I thought that was so inspiring, because the music was just so Nigerian. His music being able to open up a window into what African life was, it's like hip-hop opening the world up to the hood, to where that struggle came from. That made me realize, 'Oh my God, my job as an artist is to open up that window to my world and show people clearly what I'm seeing.'' To that point, Paradise Now, is emotional but direct. Obongjayar is 32 now, according to the Guardian (he playfully refuses to share his age with me. 'I'm going to be 25,' he says) and particularly moved by hits by Bowie and Prince. His approach to Paradise Now was influenced by old interviews of theirs too, where their perspectives were incisive and clear. 'There's not too much fat,' he says of them. 'It's been distilled to a point where it's so fine and understandable and also very unique, but it doesn't scare you away because it's too complex.' One of the Paradise Now tracks that does this best is 'Talk Olympics,' which bears the album's only vocal feature, rapper Little Simz, his close friend and frequent collaborator. The frenzied percussion on 'Talk Olympic' excitingly elicits the commotion of a dense West African market, but mirrors the similarly incessant and overwhelming chatter that can spill from the internet into real life. 'Trending topic psychologist, social media philanthropist, political biologists, talking, talking, talking rubbish,' he chants. 'Everyone just pretends they know what the hell they're talking about,' he tells me about the song's inspiration. 'Yesterday, you weren't talking about this. You had no fucking clue until it became a thing.' 'Talk Olympics' stands out as the one of the most distinctly African-sounding song on Paradise Now, where Obongjayar weaves together highlife, electro-pop, all kinds of rock, and a touch of rap into a tapestry on which he grieves broken relationships, builds new ones, and asserts himself. Across the album and much of his music, he performs with more of a Nigerian accent than the British one he's often heard speaking in. 'When I speak to my parents, my family, my brother, I speak in my Nigerian accent,' he says. 'But my saving grace is that when I think, I think in Nigerian, I think with my voice. The way I make music and the way I sing is very reflective of how I think rather than how I speak. It's pure unfiltered.' He intended to call the album Instant Animal, like the crashing, psychedelic jam session of a song on Paradise Now, thinking about what it means to really surrender to a moment. 'If you're dreaming and you fall down, your body's reaction is to wake up, because it's either you die in that dream or you wake up. That's what 'Instant Animal' is. You become this thing because you're forced into a corner.' While he was working on what would become the album though, he was hosting a series of parties called Paradise Now that also prioritized the immediate and instinctual, he and his friends being present with each other. It was also a place where he could test out the music with his collaborators. He had often gotten feedback that his songs sounded different live than on wax, and wanted to see if he could sap the dissonance. 'Sometimes the music can be too complicated to replicate live,' he says. He chose a venue called Ormside to host Paradise Now, a South East London haunt of his with a 250 capacity. 'We sold that out every single time,' he says. He loved the intimacy of it. 'There's no green room, so everyone's just in the space. It's got a small stage, there's a bar in the corner, it's quite dingy. Great sound system, great people that work there, it's just perfect. You're in the smoking area with everyone else. You're talking to people who've come. It's such a family environment. There's no separation between anyone, so you get off-stage and you're in the crowd.' As the record progressed, he says, Instant Animal felt too brash. 'It's the aggressive cousin of Paradise Now,' he says. I mention that his Paradise Now parties reminded me of the ones Janelle Monáe and friends threw while they made her last Grammy-nominated album, The Age of Pleasure. They wanted to see how their records resonated on the dancefloor. In hindsight, Obongjayar thinks he may have unknowingly been a plus one at Monáe's. Testing music at his parties, though, was even more personal. 'It's more about how it makes me feel,' he says, 'because I need to be comfortable with how it moves me.' Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
France 24
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- France 24
Music show: Obongjayar calls out 'spineless' politicians on danceable album 'Paradise Now'
Culture 12:24 Issued on: Modified: From the show In this edition of our arts24 music show, Jennifer Ben Brahim chats with UK-based Nigerian musician Obongjayar. He's just released his second album called "Paradise Now", a danceable record inspired by partying. He even hosted a series of parties of the same name in London as he was producing the record. The Ivor Novello-nominated musician moved from Nigeria to London as a teenager and his music is infused with West African rhythms, pop, punk and dance. Aside from nightlife, "Paradise Now" also talks about love, religion, belonging and calling out political inaction – like on the diss track "Jellyfish".
Hypebeast
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hypebeast
Little Simz Shares Latest Studio Album, 'Lotus'
Summary Little Simzhas lifted the veil on her latest studio album,Lotus. What lands as her most intimate and immersive project to date, the 13-track LP tells the captivating tale of Simz's growing up and coming into herself. Produced by Miles Clinton James,Lotusis a tapestry of sonic influence, the album aims to 'embody renewal and growth,' capturing Simz's artistic and personal evolution. The project was preceded by three singles, which showcased the musician's versatility to full effect. She kicked things off with 'Flood,' followed up with 'Free' and finalized the rollout with the punk-pointed cut 'Young' and its cinematic video directed by Dave Meyers. Featured artists also bridge genres, ranging fromObongjayar,Moses SumneyandMiraa MaytoMoonchild Sanelly,SamphaandYussef Dayes. Find the full tracklist below. 1. Thief2. Flood (feat. Obongjayar & Moonchild Sanelly)3. Young4. Only (feat. Lydia Kitto)5. Free6. Peace (feat. Moses Sumney & Miraa May)7. Hollow8. Lion (feat. Obongjayar)9. Enough (feat. Yukimi)10. Blood (feat. Wretch 32 & Cashh)11. Lotus (feat. Michael Kiwanuka & Yussef Dayes)12. Lonely13. Blue (feat. Sampha) StreamLotus– out on all streaming services now.
