Melony Akpoghene is a contributor to GRAMMY.com
As Ghana’s foremost R&B voice and a loyal steward of her roots, it makes sense that Gyakie’s first release after months of quiet was a heart-on-sleeve track. Partly delivered in her native Twi, its "Sankofa" — which translates to "go back and get it" in English — can be read as a metaphor for what Gyakie intends with her debut…
For Amaarae, boring is always off the table. The Ghanaian American visionary has built a career on creative risk, flipping expectations of African pop on its head, welding high fashion aesthetics to cyberpunk sonics and earning cult status in the process. In the two years since Fountain Baby — a sensuous, glossy sophomore album that demonstrated Amaarae's audacious creative instincts…
Two years after his GRAMMY-nominated album I Told Them…, Burna Boy is back with his eighth studio effort, No Sign of Weakness. It’s a tightly constructed record that builds on the zest of its predecessor, but shifts away the overt braggadocio for a steely resolve without letting go of Burna Boy’s commanding presence. No Sign of Weakness follows a whirlwind…
Afrobeats has evolved through different eras of sound, memory and experimentation. Not to be confused with Afrobeat — the highlife and jazz-infused music pioneered by Fela Kuti in the 1970s — Afrobeats (with an "s") describes something far broader, and more fluid. While Afrobeats has cracked the global mainstream, the term itself wasn’t coined on West African soil. Afrobeats was…
