By Bobby Nishimwe
Wizkid recently released his new single "Money & Love" as a teaser to his upcoming album, "More Love Less Ego." The single follows the smooth afro-fusion jazz-like vibe that Wizkid is known for from songs like "Essence" and "Mighty Wine."
One main reason for why his new single follows a similar flow to his last project is due to the fact that Wizkid had the same producer, P2J, who produced "Made In Lagos" also produce this newly released song.
If "Money & Love" is an indication of what we can expect from this upcoming album, then we will probably get the same flow and vibe as we got from his last project. This could both be a good and bad thing depending on who you ask. For the "No Lele" fans (OG fans), we might want to see how else Wizkid can reinvent himself whereas his business inclinations might sway him to curate an album similar to "Made in Lagos" that helped him stamp his standing with western audiences.
In other words, Wizkid will either cater this album to the western audience or just surprise us all.
Yesterday, he announced the track list for this project set to drop on November 11th.
Here are my initial thoughts just off of looking at the track-list:
Definitely looking forward to the Ayra Starr feature. This is the first song that these two have done together and seeing as to how successful the Tems feature was, I expect nothing less especially since these two female artists have a similar although not the same singing tone. Ayra Starr might slightly have a bit of a deeper tone to her voice than Tems, but boy oh boy am I excited for this feature.
The feature with Skillibeng and Shenseea could prove to be a hit if done right. Skillibeng and Shenseea both separately have released some of the hottest Caribbean songs within the past few years. Skillibeng released "Croocodile Teeth" in 2020 with Shenseea releasing "Shen Yeng Anthem" in 2018. Go to any Caribbean party and play any of these two songs and you will experience something you never thought was possible with the human anatomy. If we get proper island gyal Shenseea on this project, then the feature is easily a hit!
I honestly have no idea what to expect from the Naira Marley feature. And no, for those of you who don't know, Naira is not related to the Jamaican Reggae legend Bob Marley. This Marley is Nigerian and makes trench-afrobeats, which is a form of Nigerian music popular in the streets of Lagos. It is made for trench-warriors; fans of trench music who enjoy the often times fast tempo of this sub-genre that allows them to do dance moves that require a quick switching of leg movements from side to side and front to back. Wizkid is not known for that kind of rhythm, so I genuinely do not know what to expect.
The Don Toliver feature will more than most likely be the most experimental that Wizkid gets on this album. If you are familiar with Don Toliver, an American Hip-Hop/RnB artist from Texas, you would know that most of his music is experimental in nature. I would liken his form of Hip-Hop to Brent Faiyaz's type of RnB. You can't really fit them in their respective genre with a normative understanding of how songs within those genres are supposed to be composed and sung.
I saw some folks on twitter complaining about this project only having thirteen songs. This length is actually consistent with the last two albums Wizkid has released, all of them had a track-list between 12-14 songs long.
There is definitely a risk associated with having a track-list of this length in today's streaming-heavy music business, but a project of this length also bears some great opportunity for the artist. If the individual tracks are great then they will get a much higher replay value and increase streaming numbers because you have a "no-skip" album.
Now, most artists create long projects because they want to gain increased streams from those passive listeners of their albums. These are listeners who are not too picky about the individual songs on a project or when one plays an album while they are doing chores/running errands; they generally do not have the wherewithal to skip the songs that they don't like when listening to an album.
All in all, I am excited for this album and can not wait to provide you full-on review of the entire project.
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