Every week, OkayAfrica highlights the top African music releases — including the latest Afrobeats and amapiano hits — through our best music column, African Songs You Need to Hear This Week.
Read ahead for our round-up of the best new African music tracks and music videos that came across our desks this week.
Seyi Vibez, Omah Lay - "My Healer"
From the first note, “My Healer” goes straight for the heart. It’s melodic in a way that makes its emotional intent unmistakable, yet rugged enough to keep your feet moving. Seyi Vibez and Omah Lay – each formidable in his own right – form a magnetic pull that’s hard to resist. Seyi Vibez opens the record: “Tell me say you did not know that / they never told you / that I like my tea without sugar,” his cadence shifting between clipped phrasing and full-bodied melodic runs. It’s magnificent songwriting paired with a monumental delivery, signalling a reach toward higher planes. Omah Lay follows with equal weight: “O ló nífẹ̀ẹ́ mi lọ́kàn, but you keep pulling my legs / I dey put you for my mind, ọmọ ọba dẹ̀ wà lótọ̀,” (“You say you love me, but you keep teasing me / playing games with me/ I keep you on my mind/ royal child, you’re truly something special”) – bars dense with longing, heavy enough to drag the song deeper into its emotional centre. Produced by Tudor Monroe and AOD, “My Healer” plants an early flag as one of the year’s standout records, proof that when vulnerability and craft meet, the impact lingers.
Ladipoe, Maglera Doe Boy - "Motho Waka"
Ladipoe and Maglera Doe Boy represent an elite tier of lyricism on the African continent. Their catalogues defy easy categorization, stretching from the grimiest rap bars to pop-adjacent, radio-ready cuts that still knock with intent. On “Motho Waka,” they take it straight to the club, waxing lyrical about their respective lifestyles and interests. “Ke fetsa go tsoga Lagos, ha ke ko kasi / ke fetsa go Kadima tosso for dipatje,” (I just woke up in Lagos, far from my hood/ I just borrowed matchsticks to light my weed), fires Maglera Doe Boy, partially referencing his acclaimed opening line on K.O’s “Let Me Cook.” He rides the first four bars before handing the rest to Ladipoe, who continues the rhyme scheme to devastating effect. “Di success guh silence di gossip, Lagos to Jozi, it’s popping,” he raps, signaling a sharp awareness of the cross-continental exchange powering contemporary African music. The chorus doubles as a nod to South African pop culture: listeners in the know will catch Maglera riffing on DJ Mujava and Bojo Mujo’s “Mujava Naja,” reworking it into a modern mantra that speaks to his range and inventiveness. Produced by Andre Vibez, “Motho Waka” lands as feel-good rap built for packed dance floors, luxury rides, and moments when confidence does all the talking.
Wizkid, Asake - "Turbulence"
Wizkid and Asake linking up already feels iconic, especially with an entire EP built on the two of them trading verses, vibing like old friends who’ve learned each other’s swing and complementing each other’s styles in service of the whole. REAL, Vol. 1 plays out like a series of conversations between artists assured in who they are. There’s no overcompensating here; everything is in service of the music, and of course, the people who’ve witnessed their reign. “Turbulence” serves as the antithesis to “Jogodo,” the first single that teased this collaborative effort. Where the latter is fast-paced and tailor-made for the dance floor, the former unfolds like the record a deejay plays to cool the room down without killing the mood — maintaining an almost ethereal calm.
“Too many lies / too many people wey no nice/many many dey over-wise,” sings Asake, relaxed and unhurried, melting seamlessly into the plush Afrobeats instrumental courtesy of Magicsticks and 4tunez. Wizkid follows suit on the second verse: “Happy life with my family / where I dey now, see that they can’t believe […] I be minding my business, I no send none,” leaning fully into ease and clarity, confident in his role as an elder statesman of the African music landscape. This is tradition, legacy, and companionship rendered effortless. It's music made without strain, wrapped in a calm so assured in its ability that it feels unbreakable. Epic!
Dumama - “No Abiding City"
In certain instances, the word 'experimental' fails to capture the full breadth of an artist’s practice. It flattens what is expansive and far-reaching, collapsing entire universes into easily digestible shorthand. Dumama is experimental, yes, yet there is something else at play here: a gift, a grit, a deep self-awareness, a multiverse of intention and becoming. “No Abiding City,” produced by Nandi Ndlovu of Kajama acclaim, occupies that transcendental space where worlds fracture and meaning sharpens in the aftermath. The uhadi acts as an anchor, tuned to a frequency that works directly on the spirit. Soul music. Healing music. Trance music. What emerges is the sound of intention lived in real time. Dumama has shared that this body of work has been gestating for six years, and even without that context, the music reveals its patience. You hear it in the way the voice coils around bass-heavy frequencies, in melodies that arrive like blunt force before opening into something tender, an embrace of what it means to exist in communion with ancestral light.
ZENA - "My Love Your Love"
ZENA’s new single is hard-hitting, a compact companion that stretches limits, breaks boundaries, and mines the past to imagine a present unconcerned with trends. “My Love Your Love” leans into classic Ethio-jazz, anchored by a steady, piercing bassline, synths that feel celebratory in their humanity, and guitar licks that drift in and out of the warmth held down by the drums. In the midst of it all, vocal chants drenched in reverb lift the song into something almost celestial, transporting the listener skyward and leaving no part of your inner personhood untouched. Soulful, funky, and exceptionally dope.
Tiken Jah Fakoly - "Mutamba" feat. DeCastro
It is impossible, borderline disrespectful, to speak about African reggae without invoking the name Tiken Jah Fakoly. Born into a family of griots in Côte d’Ivoire, he embodies a tradition rooted in reverence for music, a grounded sense of self, and an unwavering commitment to community. “Mutamba” is reggae in its most classical form: a bed of one-drop rhythm carried by warm horn lines, coloring the groove and wrapping it in melodies that at once feel comforting and defiant.
The song references Congolese politician Constant Mutamba, the former Minister of Justice, currently incarcerated in Congo-Kinshasa amid mounting political tensions. “I think this man was set up because they saw that his popularity was starting to rise,” Tiken Jah Fakoly shared on Instagram. Within the song, he draws a deliberate parallel between Mutamba’s situation and the fate of Patrice Lumumba, a leader of the people, silenced for his convictions by colonial and neo-colonial forces. History, as ever, repeats itself. Artists like Tiken Jah Fakoly function as custodians of memory, insisting that these patterns be named, remembered, and resisted. This is tradition for him, a role he has played before in songs addressing Guinea’s Alpha Condé and Senegal’s Ousmane Sonko. Reggae, in Fakoly’s hands, remains a living archive, a reminder to stay attuned to our collective moral compass.
Msaki, Jesse Clegg - "Untimely Disclosure"
There is a sophistication, an elegance that resists categorization, in the way Msaki and Jesse Clegg write songs. “Untimely Disclosure” unsettles assumptions and goes straight for the jugular. It feels bracing, a quiet rebellion against an era of fast-food listening that often substitutes vibes for meaning and urgency for care. On the song, the two artists operate as interlocutors, giving language to feelings that tend to evade articulation. Their music becomes a portal for self-understanding — or perhaps more accurately, a mirror in which reflective thought can rest without distortion. As their third release together, following “How Dare You” and “Wayside Lover,” “Untimely Disclosure” continues to showcase an exceptional shared ability: the careful packaging of complex inner worlds and their translation into song. Measured and intentional, this collaboration affirms what both artists have long demonstrated: craft, when handled with patience, still cuts through.
Sibongile Nene - "Vusamazulu (Credo Mutwa)"
Certain artists act as interlocutors, resisting easy classification. Such is the case with Sibongile Nene — a healer through song, a matriarch divinely ordained. On “Vusamazulu (Credo Mutwa),” she pours libations for the late Credo Mutwa: healer, author, and cultural custodian whose teachings urged us to understand our history and origins as a pathway toward living in the fullness of our greatness. The music moves with intention, breathing life into forgotten corners. It is ethereal, drifting between past, present, and future, guided by a rare clarity and self-awareness. This is music with purpose — sonic ritual as remembrance, a kaleidoscope of subliminal messages inviting reflection and return to self.
Nino Fresko - "Sdakwa"
Nino Fresko is a rising presence in South African hip-hop, steadily building a catalogue of unassuming, immensely satisfying rap tunes. On “Sdakwa,” he bends words to his will, and they comply. His approach isn’t tight-fisted; instead, he floods the record with reference points, inviting listeners to lose themselves in the maze. Here, Fresko inches closer to the sun, deploying rhyme schemes that feel untethered from convention. Listen to how he pairs “skrrr skrrr” with “YouTube” in the opening bars, how he leaves space instead of overcrowding the song, how he rides the beat with a kind of reckless abandon. This is generational rap music in the making, and it feels less like a question of if than when the wider audience catches on.
Tuks Senganga - “Kudala”
Tuks Senganga, a central force in the Motswako movement that gripped South African hip-hop in the mid-2000s, and which continues to echo through later-day artists from Maglera Doe Boy to Cassper Nyovest, offers a clear reminder of why he became a leading light in the first place. “Kudala” is head-nod hip-hop, stripped of frills and excess. He's venomous on the mic, stopping at nothing and holding nothing back. When he raps, “it’s the rap phenomenon you hardly hear about,” the line lands as a knowing nod to Biggie, to old-school hip-hop, and to his own stature as an artist. Tuks Senganga has been running a marathon, not a sprint — and “Kudala” is proof that he’s still got it
