When Nigerian singer Rema emerged with one of the best Afrobeats songs of the late 2010s, “Dumebi,” he was a teenager and he sounded like it. He looked like it in the video, too, a sunny hang with other fashionable teens in the kind of bright casuals you could snag from Forever 21. His nasal trills exuded youthful innocence, even though he was coming on to some young woman by calling his dick a banana in Yoruba. His voice had barely dropped when the original version of “Calm Down” was released about three years later. It then became an international hit when Selena Gomez rode the wave of its catchy hook, soft spokenness, and slick amorism on an official remix. It led to Rema winning the MTV Video Music Awards’ inaugural Moon Person [f.k.a. Moon Man] for Afrobeats and becoming the first African artist to lead a track that earned over one billion streams on Spotify.
“Calm Down” was a single on his debut album, Rave & Roses, marked by sweet, seductive Afrobeats tinged with jazz and dancehall, an aesthetic of colorful cartoons, and a teddy bear mascot. There was always a slight edge to the saccharine as Rema rose through the ranks of Afrobeats with a few EPs and that album, but it was globally palatable and much like what was popular at the time – SoundCloud rap, poppy Afrobeats, and alternative R&B. His latest album, Heis, is nothing like that. Fittingly, it takes after not only his longtime social media handle – heisrema – but the Greek word for “number one.” Rema is visibly stronger now at 24 than he was at 19 and his imagery is moodier – so moody, in fact, that after a groundbreaking, sold-out show at London’s O2 arena, he was accused of Satanism.
He vehemently refutes those claims, but on Heis, he seems to have some fun with them, morphing his new baritone to mock and resonate. He dips into his signature swirly scales on “Villain,” which subtly samples Lana Del Rey, but on the single “Hehehe,” he sounds hollow, mimicking the heartlessness he promises, and on “Ozeba,” he dances between the two approaches, with a delightfully whiny hook but ghoulish verses. The thing that really grinds Rema’s gears about the O2 debacle, he told Rolling Stone, is that what was being perceived as devilish (bats, an expressionless mask, the rearing horse he entered on cloaked in a cape) were actually relics of the very specific culture of his hometown, Benin City, Nigeria, about 200 miles east of Lagos. “It was quite heartbreaking,” he said. Heis, too, zeroes in on hyperlocality now that Rema is a crossover superstar. It’s immediately electric and the current carries through to the very end.
First, Rema doubled down on his hometown iconography on the album’s militant lead single “Benin Boys,” with Shallipopi, who is from the same place. The rest of the album continues to deny itself the popular Amapiano-fication of Afropop for the styles of Afrobeats’ origins instead. “Egungun,” like much of the Heis, sounds like Rema enlisted an army of Nigeria’s finest drummers and ancestrally intuitive beatsmiths to percuss into oblivion (the titular word itself refers to elaborate mascarades in the Yoruba tradition). “Azaman,” with its shiny, choppy synths and quick repetitions, feels reminiscent of 2010s Afrobeats anthems “Shake Body” by Skales and “Show You the Money,” by Wizkid. Yet Rema’s takes go darker and deeper, exuding strength and certainty. They downplay the EDM influence of yesteryear’s Nigerian pop for more instrumentalism, authenticity, and lusciousness. He covers the production almost exclusively in native tongues — there’s virtually no straight-up English here.
Rema has taken to calling his own style of Afrobeats “Afro-rave,” in the tradition of Burna Boy and the like who have fought to differentiate themselves from what became a catchall for African music in general, instead of the particular brands of Nigerian and Ghanaian pop building off of regional traditions like highlife, hiplight, jùjú, palmwine, and more. Yet, there was no real sonic signifier for Rema’s Afro-wave – he seamlessly traverses hip-hop, house, R&B, and dancehall. Heis sounds more like a rave than almost anything Rema has made prior (excluding the excellent loosey “Bounce,” for example), raging while everything else simmers. The result is the buzzy, visceral, sweat-it-out music that no one else in the mainstream is making.
“March Am” kicks the album off with organized chaos – almost all drums over eerie, organ-like synths and orchestral strings, not unlike “Ozeba.” The engine revving in “March Am” and later “War Machine” make Rema sound like the head of a biker gang, with the latter easing into a speedy stretch down open roads with the kind of amazing soul sample you might find on a Griselda track. Here, Rema pulls back on the weight of the drums and airs out the synths, with rising Nigerian rapper/singer/cool guy Odumodublvck’s unmistakable snarl giving it an intimidating edge. “Yayo,” Heis’s most melodic offering, may be the track that lights up the dance floors brightest. It also has a rare sense of ease about it, where Rema is chiefly concerned with how he’s gonna fit all his cars in his yard instead of the vengeance that dominates the rest.
Indeed, Heis sees Rema powered by spite, where before, it was love, sex, and enjoyment. “I’m not gonna take it easy on my hater,” he taunts on the uncanny “Hehehe,” that ghostly bellow in full force. Rolling Stone once called Rema “Afrobeats’ New Superhero” – now he takes care to say that he’s the bad guy. He’s relentless and witty all over, like when he mocks anyone who wants to hold him back: “Shey you wan gatekeep who sabi jump fence eh?” he says sarcastically in Pidgin on “Ozeba”: “Oh, you want to gatekeep someone who can hop fences?” He takes even more care on “Now I Know” to explain that really, he’s hurt, and he’s lashing out because of it. In a truly remarkable feat of Afrobeats’ songwriting – of which Rema has a leading pen – he sings that trauma, chronicling how taking on financial obligation for his family as a child, sleepless nights, and constant criticism have turned him colder. “E get as God go bless person dem go talk say na devil o,” he says, meaning, loosely, “When God blesses someone, other people say its the Devil.” Sound familiar?
In turn, Rema has looked inward — and backwards. “With everything going viral and everything just spreading across the world, I feel like it has also affected the sound [of Afrobeats],” Rema told Rolling Stone. “We’re not just making what the people at home would enjoy. We’re also making what we hope the world would also enjoy. I got rid of that mentality getting in the studio, like, ‘I’ll start with what I love. The rest of the world can catch up.’” That incisiveness has led him to some of the best music of his budding career.
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