On her new EP, 'The Lick Back,' the Kenyan singer turns revenge into reclamation, opening up about leaving her label deal, rebuilding her confidence, and learning to trust herself again.
Paula AdhisPaulaAdhisNairobi-Based East Africa Correspondent
Nikita Kering’ enters a sharper, more self-possessed era with The Lick Back, a project about revenge, reclamation, and learning to trust herself again.courtesy of Nikita Kering’
The day before Nikita Kering’ was set to perform music from her new EP for the first time, her voice disappeared.
The show in early June was supposed to mark a return of sorts. It was her first time sharing songs from The Lick Back — her first project since 2022 — and a chance to reconnect with fans in real time. But Kering’ had been sick with a bad cold, and by the time she woke up after the final rehearsal, her vocal cords were inflamed, and she had been placed on vocal rest.
By then, it was too late to cancel. The only option left was the one that made her deeply uncomfortable. She lip-synced.
For an artist whose career has been built around her voice, it was a difficult compromise.
“Somebody paid their ticket to come and listen to a live show, they didn’t pay to come and listen to the track,” she tells OkayAfrica a few days later, her voice still recovering. “I hate the dishonesty behind that.”
Though rocky, this was a determined start to a chapter about reclaiming what she had lost.
On The Lick Back, Kering’ is thinking about revenge, though not as retaliation. She remembers seeing the phrase “get your lick back” in passing, and it stayed with her because it seemed to name what the past year had taken out of her: control, confidence, and a sense of ease after a period marked by difficult transitions and grief.
“For me, getting revenge can never mean going on attack,” she explains. “It actually just means winning for myself… just doing really well for myself.”
Before the tough period, Kering’ had been moving with real momentum. Her first project, A Side of Me, helped move her beyond the teen-prodigy narrative, while her follow-up, The Other Side, expanded her profile as one of Kenya’s most visible young R&B and pop voices. This all came with a growing profile that included AFRIMA wins and recognition from Apple Music's Africa Rising. In 2022, that visibility led to a recording deal with Universal Music Africa.
“For me, getting revenge can never mean going on attack,” Nikita Kering’ explains. “It actually just means winning for myself… just doing really well for myself.”courtesy of Nikita Kering’
But the years after that were not as clean as the achievements suggested. Kering’ has spent the last year working to get out of that deal, a process the 24-year-old describes as emotionally exhausting, expensive, and costly in terms of opportunities.
“It was a terrible experience trying to get out of the contract,” she says. “Just getting out of that process as a whole was crazy, and recovering financially from that as well was crazy. It hindered me from being able to get other opportunities, because a lot of people don’t want to be involved with somebody who just has a lot of baggage.”
At the same time, she was also grieving the loss of loved ones. She tried to keep working through it, but she could feel the distance growing between herself and the music.
“I was dropping singles, and you can just tell that those singles were so uninspired,” she says, noting that she lost fans along the way. “They didn’t even feel like me, and I feel like my fans felt it wasn’t me.”
That is the emotional ground that shaped The Lick Back. Newly independent and trying to find her way back to herself, Kering’ was determined to stop moving on autopilot.
The first act of getting her lick back was refusing to release music that no longer felt like her. So she scrapped a whole other EP that was ready for release.
“It had already been finished…. But the same day [my team] gave me a due date for the final masters, I just changed my mind,” she explains. “I was like, no, this music is not a reflection of who I am today.”
Instead of trying to fix the old project, she wrote The Lick Back in three weeks.
“I was dropping singles and you can just tell that those singles were so uninspired,” she says, noting that she lost fans along the way. “They didn’t even feel like me, and I feel like my fans felt it wasn’t me.”courtesy of Nikita Kering’
That refusal to compromise also changed how she worked. In the past, Kering’ says, she could overthink songs until they became weighed down by other people’s opinions. This time, she kept the process close.
“It was about trusting myself, but also accepting I might make bad decisions, and I need to be okay living with that… even if this wasn’t the [right] song, I have to be okay with that.”
The same shift shows up in the way she talks about boundaries. Kering’ says she used to be too forgiving, often allowing hurt to build quietly instead of addressing it.
“With this one, it was about saying I’m not gonna stay in a space that isn’t serving me,” she says.
Those new boundaries show up across the five-song EP, in romance, business, and the way Kering’ now chooses to make music. On “Niwache,” the lead single, she sings about being tired of unclear love and asks someone to either choose her properly or leave her alone.
“Ka hunitaki si uniwache (If you don’t want me, just leave me),” she sings in the dancehall-tinged song.
Her new stance also comes through clearly on “Give Me My Money.” The song is direct in its demand for proper payment and valuation, but it also points to a broader frustration with the music business. Kering’ says artists are often expected to navigate complicated contracts without the knowledge or support to understand them properly, opening them up to being exploited, dismissed, or underpaid.
“They know that artists don’t go to school for this,” she says. “They can write over-complicated contracts in a way that the artist is not going to understand. That’s why artists need to consider that their managers need to know business, and they need to know law.”
She admits that going independent is hard and expensive, especially as an artist trying to do label-level work with their own money. But leaving that situation also taught her that corporations are not as frightening as they can seem. With a real fan base and a strong community, an artist is not powerless.
“I’m not opposed to labels,” she says. “I’m opposed to a bad deal.”
If the business side of The Lick Back is about speaking up, the sound of the EP is about loosening up. Kering’ wanted to have fun again! She stopped chasing what she thought people wanted from her and leaned into the genres she actually loves to sing, like dancehall, Afrobeats, R&B, and ballads–her forever signature.
“With this EP I just did what I like,” she says. “If you get it, you get it. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it, and that’s fine.”
The “Intro,” featuring Kenyan Afro House sensation Sofiya Nzau, is especially important to her because it is the first time she sings in her mother tongue on a record. For Kering’, that choice is a statement about Kenyan identity, and about finding a way to represent Kenyan-ness that feels authentic to her.
Still, The Lick Back does not pretend to resolve everything. Kering’ does not know exactly what comes after getting her lick back. What she does know is that she wants to return to the studio and create from her authentic center.
“This is me finally just being a grown-up and a grown woman,” she says. “I just met a version of myself that wants the best for me.”
