One of Obongjayar’s earliest musical memories is of his downstairs neighbours on Sunday mornings, gathering to bake, sing and praise together before Church. “I’d go sit down next to the kitchen and try to join them but they’d chase me away,” he laughs. “I was always attracted to music, I always had it in my mind.” Raised by his grandmother in Calabar, Nigeria as a child, until he moved to London to join his mother as a teenager, OB’s sound embraces his dual cultures as his greatest superpower: filtering the playful warmth and texture of West African rhythms and cadence through a daringly modern gaze to create something uniquely his. It’s the same quality that had him called on by Danny Brown and Afrobeats superproducer Sarz for collaborations. It’s the spin he’s brought to hit features with Fred again… and Little Simz and the innovation that earned him an Ivor Novello nomination for his own critically acclaimed debut album Some Nights I Dream of Doors. Ultimately, it’s cemented him as one of the most infectious and original voices coming out of the UK right on now. 

Since his debut however, Obongjayar’s creative approach has shifted. While he approached his debut with the lofty goal to reach new musical frontiers, he’s come to realise that those kinds of parameters can restrict you as much as they might motivate you. “You can’t think about breaking barriers,” he says. “The barriers you break are ones you built yourself.” Nowadays, he’s focused on getting out of his own head and diving into the world around him. If ‘Some Nights I Dream of Doors’ was driven by the desire to voyage through worlds, ‘Paradise Now’ resides firmly in the present moment. Put simply, “everything exists here. The beauty is [already] here.” 

The result, on his follow up ‘Paradise Now’, is an ambitiously fresh global prospect, with roots grounded in his own wide-ranging world of influences. It’s everything from pop to punk, dance to Afrobeat, funk to folk, refracted through a thrilling new perspective. “I wanted an album that I could listen to from start to finish on a night out.” But he still considers it something of a Trojan Horse. Recorded between London and LA with UK alt-rap mainstay Kwes Darko (Pa Salieu, John Glacier), Californian producer Yeti Beats (Doja Cat) and Grammy-winning production trio Beach Noise (Kendrick Lamar, Baby Keem, Bakar), the record is as emotionally complex and broad as Obongjayar has ever been, even within its contagious candy coating. “Nothing’s been exchanged. Within that new groove, there’s still something you can take away, but it’s not meant to be a puzzle to decipher, it’s not a maths problem,” he smiles. 

Single ‘Just My Luck’ is a perfect example of that. A widescreen funk-pop earworm, with featherlight electro-pop inflections and bubblegum synths that wash over you as he croons ‘I didn’t get what I wanted, it was just what I needed to keep me going.’ “It’s about loneliness and FOMO,” OB explains. “When you think you’re losing out on something and it might just be giving you an opportunity to do something else.” He recalls being a teenager and feeling like he was on the outside of things, whether it was because he lived far away or his mum wouldn’t let him out, wanting to be a part of a crew or sometimes just not being invited. “When you’re a kid, you have all these ideas, the things that you think you want…All these things you might not have had, but they in turn add to what you become. And you don’t recognise that until you’re further along.” 

‘Not In Surrender’ is about the transcendence on the other side of that. Coming into yourself as an adult and experiencing joy in all its potency, opening with the lines, ‘I put my hands up, not in surrender, I’m getting ready to fly.’ “It’s basically about partying and staying up all night. You’re just feeling yourself,” he laughs. It’s no surprise then that it conjures a Prince-like euphoria as it builds and soars, all breathless adlibs and syncopated percussion. It’s New Year’s Eve, it’s floating, it’s that night you never want to end. ‘Sweet Danger’ is its flirtier counterpart, OB self-assured and winking

over syncopated drums, sultry guitars and a fanfare of horns: ‘heard you like the bad boys, yeah I’m a bad boy, can’t stop, won’t stop.’ 

The sonic palette of the project is thrilling and comprehensive. Flitting between 21st century Afrobeat on ‘Talk Olympics (Tok Tok)’ to ragged synth-punk on Rishi Sunak diss track ‘Jellyfish’. Somewhere in the middle of the album, there’s a pocket of pure vulnerability, sharp and moving. ‘Born In This Body’ is a sweetly melodic affirmation. Meditating on the very idea of beauty and self and relationship 

between the two, as he recalls, ‘six years old, standing in the front room, told my grandma I’m ugly, she sat me down, with a smile on her face, said ‘you’re worried about the wrong things.’’ 

Elsewhere, there’s a spiritual language threaded through the album, the vocabulary hinting at the remnants of OB’s Christian upbringing more than anything else, evoked to convey strong feelings not ideology. To him, he says, the image of a ‘Holy Mountain’ is a symbol of peace, ‘hallelujah’ is an expression of pure joy and ‘Prayer’ is a letter, not to God, but to the very idea of faith as something to lean on. “There’s peace in religion, it’s grounding,” he says with an almost-envy. 

But for now, he’s constructing his own definition of paradise, as a place to enjoy and an ethos to live by. To put it simply, it’s “no rules, total freedom, total acceptance, total confidence in self, in body, in mind. You’re not restricting yourself to an idea of yourself, you are yourself.” It’s a battle to stay there all the time, he admits, but it’s something he’s working towards and has arrived at on this record.

‍