It is easy to forget how young the modern Afrobeats era is. Wizkid’s Ayo, released on 17 September 2014, is one of its cornerstones, and twelve years later it still sounds like a young man reaching for something bigger than the room he made it in.
Before Ayo
Ayodeji Ibrahim Balogun grew up in Ojuelegba, Surulere, recorded his first music at 11 with a church group called the Glorious Five, and learned the business by hanging around the studios where 2Face Idibia and Sound Sultan were working. Banky W signed him to Empire Mates Entertainment in 2009. “Holla at Your Boy” won him Next Rated at The Headies, and his debut album Superstar (2011) made him a star.
Superstar announced a talent, but it was the work of a prodigy still proving he belonged. By the time he sat down to make his second album he had the hits, a rivalry with Davido that split the country’s fans in two, and the pressure that comes with both. The question was no longer whether he could make a smash. It was whether he could make a record.
The record
Ayo answered with range. There were club records like “Jaiye Jaiye” and love songs, and there was a new looseness in his voice: a singer who had stopped trying to prove anything and started trying to feel things. It was also the last album of his E.M.E era. He left the label after his contract ran out.
It is not a perfect album. It is a generous one, and generosity ages better than perfection.
“Ojuelegba”
The album’s centre of gravity became a song named after the Lagos neighbourhood he grew up in. “Ojuelegba” was specific, almost humble: a song about struggle and the people who knew you before the money. That specificity is exactly why it travelled.
When Drake and Skepta jumped on the remix in 2015, it did not feel like a Nigerian artist being rescued by Western stars. It felt like the rest of the world catching up with a song that was already complete. That distinction matters, and Wizkid understood it better than most. The remix opened the door that “One Dance” walked through the following year, when his feature on Drake’s single topped the Billboard Hot 100.
The long tail
Everything that made Made in Lagos work six years later is present on Ayo in rougher form: the restraint, the cool, the refusal to shout. Ayo is where Wizkid learned he did not have to be the loudest voice to be the biggest star. He could sing quietly and let the songs do the reaching.
You can trace the line forward through Sounds from the Other Side (2017), his RCA debut, through Made in Lagos (2020), which topped Billboard’s World Albums chart, and through “Brown Skin Girl” with Beyoncé, which won him a Grammy. It carries on to Morayo (2024), the album dedicated to his late mother, which set the record for the biggest Spotify debut by an African album.
Why it still matters
Twelve years on, Ayo captures the exact moment Afrobeats stopped being a local scene and started imagining itself as a global one. You can hear the ambition and the nerves in the same breath. It also marks a generational turn: the artists who now dominate the charts, from Asake to Rema, grew up with this record as part of the air they breathed.
Put it on now and it does not sound like history. It sounds like the start of the African pop we are still living in.
