This Artist Waited Years for a Breakout. Then AI Gave Him a Hit.

Elvin Cena has been waiting his whole life for the big hit that would change his life.

In February, it finally arrived in the form of “Let Me Be,” a viral amapiano-inspired track about the freedom of a night out on the dancefloor. Since its debut, the song has racked up over 13 million combined YouTube views, spread quickly on TikTok, and climbed charts in countries across Europe and Africa.

“I don’t want to say that it’s me who sang the song, because it’s not me,” he admitted to OkayAfrica during a phone call last week. “I want to say that it’s a real song, but it’s an AI song.”

The 21-year-old Rwandan-born artist says he originally recorded the song in a studio in France — where he is currently studying — about six months before it exploded. The melody was his. The lyrics were his. But he was unhappy with the production and decided he would not release it.

So he did what a growing number of artists are now doing: he turned to AI and started experimenting with the song.

Cena uploaded his original song to Suno AI and began prompting the program. “I started with amapiano because I needed something that was danceable,” he explains about his process. “In the second verse, I need a woman singing with me.”

He compared the process of endlessly changing the prompts to using ChatGPT to write your CV. You have to keep correcting and adjusting things until the final version finally clicks.

Eventually, one did…and that was the problem.

The Second Voice

Cena is not some anonymous user trying to fake his way to making money through music. He is a real artist with a real catalogue. Since taking music seriously in 2020, he has built a modest but genuine audience around songs that move between English, Kinyarwanda, and French. His official YouTube page has about 14,000 subscribers, and he has more than 10,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. His visuals, including those for his recent single “Flowers,” are sleek and polished. He was a rising artist with his own path to prove. It’s why he knew he couldn’t honestly release “Let Me Be” song under his name. 

“I'm an artist too [and] I don't want to be associated with AI 100%,” he explained. “So I [uploaded a song under a new name called] ‘The Second Voice’. It's not a human. It's just a name I gave to it.”

The song was uploaded on a new channel called “The Second Voice” on February 8, 2026 and left it alone. Then the internet took over.

At first, Cena did not even realize the song was taking off. Then he started hearing it spread on social media. “I saw people start to post my song in their Instagram [stories]. And I was like, ‘That’s my song! That’s my song!’” he said. “I checked TikTok and the song has been used in over 50,000 videos.”

By the time he understood what was happening, “Let Me Be” had already moved far beyond his control. It hit one million views in just three days, while he sat there refreshing YouTube Studio in disbelief.

The Hit He Couldn’t Fully Claim

For most artists, that would be the dream. For Cena, it created a strange dilemma.

He did not want to associate the song to his main artist identity, but he also did not want the momentum to pass without taking advantage of it. So once the track started climbing charts, he cut an “official music video” and uploaded it to Elvin Cena Production, a YouTube channel where he posts video edits and his other projects. This time, he made sure to include his name in the credits: The Second Voice featuring Elvin Cena.

After “Let Me Be” crossed one million views and began rising on the charts, he decided to lean in and use the moment to promote himself as an artist.

“After it hit one million, I saw the song was climbing a lot of charts” he says. And I added my name to also promote my work too and my name…because it’s my project too.”

Before “Let Me Be,” his biggest songs were tracks like “Ka Sa Lo” from 2022 and “Jejeli” from 2023. But none of his earlier releases came close to this scale.

On YouTube, the “official music video” of “Let Me Be” started climbing the tracks, hitting 2 million in just six days. When the song hit no. 15 on the French YouTube charts, Cena posted about it on his instagram stories. It would go on to climb as high as no. 12 in France, the top 16 in Belgium, and The top 10 in both Kenya and Tanzania among others.

The comments helped explain why it was spreading so fast. “This sound is so amazing there is a connection to my spiritual being,” said one commenter on the song’s YouTube page. “Look at Africa taking over the music industry,” someone wrote. Another praised the track’s “angelic” female vocal, not knowing that the voice was not from a real person. 

Asked whether he feels guilty that listeners may now discover “Let Me Be” was created with AI, Cena was blunt.

“No, not really,” he said. “They have to understand. It’s just the beginning of the future.”

If people are angry now, he says, that anger will not last. “In one year, I can see that it will be normal to listen to AI music.” He compared the current discussion about AI in music to the suspicion that once surrounded the internet. 

“The future is like when the internet started,” he said. “Everybody was [worried], but finally everyone is using it.”

Since launching publicly in late 2023, Suno AI has grown into a major headache for the music industry. The platform allows users to create full songs from simple prompts, or upload their own audio and build music around it. That is what Cena did with “Let Me Be.” Billboard has reported that the platform now generates roughly 7 million songs a day. According to the Financial Times, Suno AI is currently at a standoff with the traditional music business. The paper reported this month that licensing talks between Suno and major labels including Universal and Sony have stalled. But those conversations are happening in conference rooms and Zoom calls far away from Africa, where the implications of AI music are coming into view.

Cena, for his part, is surprisingly clear about the limits. He does not respect the idea of artists outsourcing the entire creative act to a platform and then presenting the result as their work. That distinction matters to him. In his view, AI should be a tool to test ideas, tighten production, add melodies, suggest backing vocals, or help a stuck producer figure out a song. 

“Use it to give you some ideas, not to use it 100 percent,” he says. It is also why he is careful to emphasize that the melody and lyrics of “Let Me Be” came from him, and why he shared the original version for review. 

For all his talk about the future, Cena still sounds stunned by the irony of his own breakthrough. “It’s crazy,” he says. “I made ‘Let Me Be’ in like one hour, maybe 30 minutes, and it’s going viral. Since 2020, I’ve been working, but I never made a song like this.”