One of Obongjayar’s earliest musical memories is of his downstairs neighbours on Sunday mornings, gathering to bake, sing and praise together before Church. “I’d go sit down next to the kitchen and try to join them but they’d chase me away,” he laughs. “I was always attracted to music, I always had it in my mind.”
Raised by his grandmother in Calabar, Nigeria as a child, until he moved to London to join his mother as a teenager, OB’s sound embraces his dual cultures as his greatest superpower: filtering the playful warmth and texture of West African rhythms and cadence through a daringly modern gaze to create something uniquely his. It’s the same quality that had him called on by Danny Brown and Afrobeats superproducer Sarz for collaborations. It’s the spin he’s brought to hit features with Fred again… and Little Simz and the innovation that earned him an Ivor Novello nomination for his own critically acclaimed debut album Some Nights I Dream of Doors. Ultimately, it’s cemented him as one of the most infectious and original voices coming out of the UK right on now.
Since his debut however, Obongjayar’s creative approach has shifted. While he approached his debut with the lofty goal to reach new musical frontiers, he’s come to realise that those kinds of parameters can restrict you as much as they might motivate you. “You can’t think about breaking barriers,” he says. “The barriers you break are ones you built yourself.” Nowadays, he’s focused on getting out of his own head and diving into the world around him. If Some Nights I Dream of Doors was driven by the desire to voyage through worlds, Paradise Now resides firmly in the present moment. Put simply, “everything exists here. The beauty is [already] here.”
The result, on his follow up Paradise Now, is an ambitiously fresh global prospect, with roots grounded in his own wide-ranging world of influences. It’s everything from pop to punk, dance to Afrobeat, funk to folk, refracted through a thrilling new perspective. “I wanted an album that I could listen to from start to finish on a night out.” But he still considers it something of a Trojan Horse. Recorded between London and LA with UK alt-rap mainstay Kwes Darko (Pa Salieu, John Glacier), Californian producer Yeti Beats (Doja Cat) and Grammy-winning production trio Beach Noise (Kendrick Lamar, Baby Keem, Bakar), the record is as emotionally complex and broad as Obongjayar has ever been, even within its contagious candy coating. “Nothing’s been exchanged. Within that new groove, there’s still something you can take away, but it’s not meant to be a puzzle to decipher, it’s not a maths problem,” he smiles.
The sonic palette of the project is thrilling and comprehensive. Flitting between 21st century Afrobeat to ragged synth-punk on Rishi Sunak diss track, and passing through pure vulnerability, sharp and moving. There’s a spiritual language threaded through the album, the vocabulary hinting at the remnants of OB’s Christian upbringing more than anything else, evoked to convey strong feelings not ideology. “There’s peace in religion, it’s grounding,” he says with an almost-envy.
But for now, he’s constructing his own definition of paradise, as a place to enjoy and an ethos to live by. To put it simply, it’s “no rules, total freedom, total acceptance, total confidence in self, in body, in mind. You’re not restricting yourself to an idea of yourself, you are yourself.” It’s a battle to stay there all the time, he admits, but it’s something he’s working towards and has arrived at on this record.
Release: June 3rd, 2025, September Recordings