Discover: Ben September Is Learning to Trust Himself

Growing up in a small town in South Africa's Free State province, Ben September spent the better part of his childhood keeping to himself, doing his best to stay out of trouble. His music reflects the qualities of time spent in solitude: in the obsessive compulsion to create music that lingers long after the fact; in lyrics that demonstrate an enviable understanding of self and environment; and in the music itself, which, even at its most complete and all-encompassing, maintains a stripped-down quality that deviates from convention.

But, as he tells OkayAfrica, he initially wasn't a fan of music, "only tapping into what people were listening to, but I never really understood why people listen to the songs they were listening to."

Curiosity got the better of him, and in the process of comprehending what fuelled this strange obsession, he ventured out and found artists who resonated with him. In high school, he discovered GoldLink, Bryson Tiller, Mick Jenkins and others that friends recommended, and began alchemizing words into poetry, turning everyday speech into molten lava to blaze up the public square.

Then, shortly before COVID-19 hit, he started dabbling in song-making, posting videos of himself rapping and singing on the internet, where an audience slowly developed.

"I did not even know what I was doing when it came to the singing thing, but I was watching Idols to teach myself how to sing," he says. He did these singing exercises to understand why the artists he vibed with weren't getting selected as winners. Repetition built muscle memory, and soon he was confident enough to set foot in a studio, leaving campus between lectures to get some hours in at a friend's spot.

He reflects on that time: "I don't know what I'm doing; I'm panicking 90 percent of the time because I feel like I'm wasting people's time. I'm trying to get things as perfect as possible. I didn't even know that part of the process was messing up. I learned that later on in life."

A community developed around that, and he was soon working with more producers and expanding his circle. "We tried to get these songs on stage, and it was a hassle, bro, because people didn't know who I was. I had to audition to [get on stage], and even when the opportunity came, last-minute changes were made. It's a little bit different now," he says.

He's since broken the proverbial bread on records alongside artists like FLVME and Prince Kaybee — the former a certified lyricist in South African hip-hop, the latter a big deal in the house scene. It's the Prince Kaybee collaboration, "Breakfast In Soweto," that raised the stakes for him.

"That was crazy and unexpected, I'm not gonna lie. I just got a random DM on Instagram. It was just one of those 'hey man, I've been watching your videos. Come to the studio, let's do something,'" he says of the moment.

He was geeked, not necessarily at the opportunity to work with Prince Kaybee, but because his mother is a big fan of the producer. He remembers saying to himself, "I guess now she'll let you do music." He got a termination email from his university during the recording session.

"The timing could not have been more perfect. Not that I wanted to drop out, but in order for me to have freedom in the movement, one had to die. I was willing to juggle both, but the problem with that is that one is gonna slack, and eventually you're gonna have to make a decision for yourself," he says.

"At first, not gonna lie, I did not like the song. The vocal mixing wasn't what we usually did — only for that song to grow on me, and to become the biggest hit in my catalog."

He later discovered that a girl had plugged Prince Kaybee to his music, which made him love and appreciate women more. "Shout out [to] all the women, bro. I'll keep making music for them because they will plug everyone," he says.

His new EP is reflective of this stance. Titled 7 Girls, it is a seven-track exploration of experiencing the same person in seven different ways. The realization that this is how the work is set out came in hindsight; it wasn't necessarily the intention when he started the project, his third body of work following Loose Ends (2023) and WAVES: Vol. 1 (2024).

"It's partly old songs, and some are newer. 'Jaja Vibes' and 'Lala' were made in 2024. 'Anxiety' we did in 2025, and every other song we did this year," he says.

Album opener "Anxiety" feels like diving head-first into hedonistic abandon, then dipping your head back to find that the world you knew no longer is. It's an alarming amount of joy packed into just over two minutes, a literal problem waiting to happen. Ben September doesn't so much float on it as exist in it: imbibing minute details, maximizing the pauses and silences between words, letting the song breathe. "How do I get out of here / can't make a decision," he sings, letting the thoughts percolate before discharging more venomous lyrics. "I get terrified / feelings I set aside," he continues, at his wits' end, looking for any way out.

"They had the beat playing, but I didn't think it was for me. So I did what I naturally do when a beat catches me — I start making riffs. With this one, I was dealing with actual anxiety, but I didn't know how to articulate it. I figured out, through the melodies and the not-so-wordy words that I was saying, just the mumbles — I was like, okay dawg, just write it as it is," he says.

He didn't want to listen to the playback initially because he was scared, he tells us. "I was like, I've never been that vulnerable on a song about anything that has to do with myself. I didn't know how people were gonna take it."

Other stand-outs include "Desire," a booty call in song form built around the knocking-est kicks and the meanest, deepest bassline you'll hear, where lyrics like "I think about you all of the time / you got a man who don't do you right" set the mood for the onslaught. "Lala" has a glockenspiel melody that instantly lightens the mood, its lyrics asking that his time not be wasted. Flowerboi features on "Jaja Vibes," which takes the best bits of what Wizkid and Asake have done and packages them in a localized dialect, to overwhelmingly great effect. Where that song has an amapiano slant, its follow-up, "Samba," feels like internalizing Brazil and exhibiting the effects on a song.

“I’m always working on other people’s stuff,” he says. “My stuff is just demos that I’ll only like later. I do something now, let it sit there til I figure out a better way to handle it. Right now, we’ve got a few demos in the vault. I’ve got another song coming with Prince Kaybee.  I think it’s gonna be better than ‘Breakfast In Soweto,’ but I’ll leave it to the public to decide. We’re working to either release a deluxe edition or make a separate project — I’m gonna try [to] make enough songs to do both at the same time.”