On 'XOXO,' Lojay Honors the Pristine Art of Emotional Preservation

Lojay honors Afrobeats as a major influence in his life. “Afrobeats made me interested in music,” he says in a conversation with OkayAfrica. “I always loved music and would listen passively, but not until Afrobeats artists taking centerstage did I even think of music as something I wanted to know about. I actually want to understand the sound.” 

Coming from a church background and tinkering with drums before he was a teenager, the interest was long-honed, but Afrobeats gave form to Lojay’s roving mind. “When it comes to Afrobeats, it’s something that I’m a little obsessive over,” he says. “And that drive to push the envelope of what sound is, more than anything drives the music I make. In my mind, I’m constantly thinking, ‘how much more different can this thing sound and still be this thing?’” 

On XOXO, the Nigerian artist explores his longing for innovation. In fourteen tracks, he sinks into the soft matter of relationships, touching emotional highlights that would elevate his reverence as a new-age poet. “There weren’t enough yearning songs in the landscape,” says Lojay about his motivation for the album, titled after a lighthearted term which means “hugs and kisses.” “I just felt like people needed music that speaks to the heart again.” 

The artistry, innovation and collaborations on XOXO

During its creation, the album’s direction would evolve. Its initial register took after the charged, hedonistic leanings of GANGSTER ROMANTIC, but its creator was changing with the months. “I just realized that that wasn’t my reality anymore,” he admits, “I had just gotten to a space of healing, of just coming to terms with life, coming to terms with love again. That’s what I wanted the body of work to represent. And making it felt like I was putting together a collection of letters and journals about my new space.” 

The project’s opening record “Salê” shines with its stripped soundscape realized from sensuous guitars and an earthy drum progression. A melancholic offering with the affectation of poetry, Lojay’s words are interwoven into the sonic texture. “As your water no gree full my basket again / And all your broken pieces make you feel ashamed / I’ll be saving myself in a bid for you,” he vows in its first verse. A soundscape we’ve scarcely seen Lojay sail through, we’re here treated to novelty early on, revealing the album’s hand with a confident vulnerability that runs through its core. 

“Jerico” sustains the feeling of a purge, as Lojay works his way around belly-strong feelings of love. His enunciation is ever clear as the intonations of a man who doesn’t want you to miss a single word he’s singing. Even when he adopts vivid percussion to embolden his vocals as on “Tenner” and “Change You Up,” there’s no loss of rhythmic sensibility — a quality that might be influenced by his revelatory process of approaching each record as a conversation.

“A lot of the songs are like that,” he says. “I’m either having a conversation with the listener or with a specific person.” Having some skills as a producer, Lojay would orchestrate the soundscape of XOXO, even producing the fruity bassline of “Miss Mariana,” a stellar portraiture which infuses riveting characterization into an often transient narrative. On “Mwah” and “Body,” he however reveals the album’s essential placelessness: with the features of British Nigerian troubadour Odeal and Colombian rapper Fied, there’s a blurring of sensibilities that carries the records from Lagos to the world and back, and then elsewhere, the pockets of space where Black music has entered in the past century.

The Odeal collaboration happened last year Christmas night. At the time, Lojay already had a complete version of the album. Both artists didn’t plan to record but the vibes were right and when Louddaaa played the beat, after sometime listening, Lojay blurted out what would eventually become its chorus. The song came together in about two hours. 

“It was a familiar sound,” he says about the Fied collaboration, which the Colombian had actually kickstarted. “It was something that I had already worked on, but it felt like an elevated version. The moment I jumped on it, all I was thinking was how do I bring this thing back to Nigeria and have it be something we all enjoy, whether we’re in Obi’s House, or the club or wherever, and it just feels like ours.” 

Lojay’s proficiency as an artist hasn’t gone under the radar. After all, not many artists have the privilege of working with Sarz in their early career. Although he’d put out the short project Midnight Vibes in 2017, its skeletal soundscape reveals an artist yet working their way around what they wanted to sound like. His love for Afrobeats was obvious, from its vocal leanings to its several interpolations, but there wasn’t a strong enough demonstration of his now-signature stylistics. For many, LV N ATTN was the real introduction to Lojay’s ability. 

There, one met a silver tongued act with enough detail to go around, painting Afrobeats in colors that belonged more within the outsized portraits of hip-hop. It wasn’t enough for Lojay to tell you he’s been moving with interesting ladies, he’d rather paint a striking picture: “Met her at the club and hesitated to judge / Whine to the bass, to the bottle of scotch.” Elsewhere, on “Monalisa,” he makes an eternal radiance of the amapiano sound, gliding over Sarz’s drums with an inevitable ear for gutsy lyricism. “Girl, I’ll be foolish if I don’t let you indulge me, your lips like poison / I’ll take my chance with you,” a sustained effort of brilliance. 

He emphasizes that the most profound lesson he gained from Sarz was artistic focus. “The entire process of putting together music till the point where I felt like I couldn’t add anything more to it,” he says. “I used to be of the opinion that you make a song today, and that’s it. And you just say, ‘oh, I have this song.’ But now, for this album especially, I remade songs, sometimes up to eight times, just to get the right fitting version of that song. That’s one thing I picked up from Sarz. ‘Cos he’s the type of person to really work on his music.” 

Lojay, on his part, has brought that focus into his writing. During our conversation, he speaks extensively on how he’s able to express the boisterous overtones of Afrobeats subjects without falling into its pitfalls of sensationalism or simplistic depiction. “I try [to] express [myself] in the most honest way possible,” he says. “Like I said, it’s a conversation. If you listen to ‘Billions’ for example, from the intro where I’m just talking about Lagos lifestyle, and what we’re on. It’s me just explaining; I’m trying to park, people are coming to collect money from me for parking, down to the fact that we need to stay working ‘cos the girls we’re trying to get with want the nice Dior bags and all of that. It’s just me being as honest about the conversation as possible, rather than just going in the angle of, ‘oh, I have money.’ It’s like, this is the life, but these are the things I see in the life.” 

Bringing it all back to XOXO, we eventually discuss Lojay’s philosophy of love. “Somebody Like You,” one of the album’s most riveting songs, makes a poignant and unique version of the well-trodden heartbreak theme, with the singer posing one of his most delicate and insightful questions — a specialty of his — he’s ever asked: “What if I gave you love to my ceiling?” 

I had to ask in return: is anyone ever that special or have we, by virtue of our affection, made them so? “I think two things can be true at the same time,” he says. “I feel like everybody in their own way is special, but at the same time, we also make them special. We give them that extra level. That’s why a lot of people say things like, ‘I put you on a pedestal.’ It’s like I put you just a little above every other person. At the end of the day, with that, I’ve just come to realize that nothing that is meant for you will pass you by. I genuinely hold that very strongly. I believe that in a situation where you feel like you’ve lost this person, you’ve given your best and nothing works out — I usually take those situations now more like blessings.” 

He expands on the idea. “A lot of times the problem comes from an insecurity of feeling like you’re not enough,” he says, “because I don’t think anybody’s irreplaceable. But when you as a person, maybe even through the course of the relationship, and because of the relationship, now start to doubt your own source, and start to doubt who you are, that’s when all that anxiety starts to creep in. Because at the end of the day, nobody that’s meant to be in your life will walk out. Everybody that is meant to be there will be there. You just need to maintain your own source, maintain who you are, and then build with that.” 

Stream XOXO here: