In May 2026 M.anifest went on X to tell his followers about a younger artist from Kumasi. He called him “a proper multi hyphenate” and added an instruction: “be early on the train”. The artist was Kwartengg, and the two had just released a song together called “Out The Mud”.
If that was the first time you heard the name, this is a guide to who he is, what he has released and where to start.
Who is Kwartengg?
Kwartengg was born Bernard Kwarteng and comes from Kumasi, where he still lives and records. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, and music is one of three things he works in. The others are fashion and film. His Instagram bio lists them in order: “God – Music – Fashion – Film”.
He told the culture site Blackstar in May 2026 that he started writing songs in junior high school, at around 14, with one model in mind. “I was so inspired by Batman. I was like, soon I will also be like Batman,” he said. Batman was the name Samini performed under early in his career. Osibisa was the other influence, as much for the idea of the band as for the records: different people coming together and taking Ghanaian culture somewhere new.
Around that time he and a group of schoolfriends decided they would be the youngest artists on the radio. The group faded out without ever formally ending. He carried on, and he now makes music full time.
The early catalogue: Ired and Akatafour Dwom
The earliest project on his streaming pages is Ired, which carries a 2019 date. It has seven songs, no guests and runs for about 22 minutes. “Ghana Man” opens it and “Father Father” closes it. In between are “Holy Water”, “Akwasi”, “Dreams and Prayer”, “Yawa” and “Weytin”. “Yawa” has a video that he directed, an early sign of how he likes to work.
After that the catalogue goes quiet until 2024. The single “Berma” came out that June, and at the end of August he released Akatafour Dwom, three tracks lasting a little over five minutes in total. “Winning”, the last of them, credits Ssnowbeatz.
Akatafour Dwom II followed on 8 February 2025 with five more songs. The titles read like an order of service: “Sermon”, “Anthem”, “Blessing” and “Pray”, with “Ogya (Fire)” to close. Religious language has been in his titles since “Holy Water” and “Father Father” on Ired.
Three singles in three months
Late 2025 was when the pace picked up. Through Elevenosix Studio he released a single a month: “As It Is” on 8 October, “Wave” on 12 November and “Power” on 17 December. “Wave” and “Power” also exist as live versions under the title Live Room. All three singles sit near the top of his most played songs on Spotify.
“Out The Mud” and the M.anifest verse
“Out The Mud” came out on 12 May 2026. Kwartengg told Blackstar he had written most of it before he got near a studio. He sent what he had to the producer Mike Millz On’Em, who invited him to Accra. M.anifest was already in the room when he arrived. Kwartengg had followed him for years, and he summed up the moment in one line: “It was like, herh, me and M Digidi.”
M.anifest wrote his verse there and then. According to Kwartengg, he also helped with the bigger questions of structure and direction.
Kwartengg will not say what the song is about. His reasoning is that his own reading of it should not replace the listener’s. He is also unusually frank about how little of the writing he feels he controlled. “The first line, that is the line I know I had 100% control over,” he said. The rest, by his account, arrived on its own: “It’s just a frequency. A frequency that I’m fortunate enough that most of the time, I catch the right ones.”
He directed, edited and colour graded the video himself, with Naa Norlley as co-creative director. He says he learned filmmaking so that he would never be stuck waiting on someone else, and that he would hand the job to anyone who could do it better.
How he describes his sound
Ask what genre all this is and he resists. “I’m not a fan of boxes,” he told Blackstar. Streaming services file him under hip-hop because a distributor makes every artist tick something. He would rather call it soul music.
He also does not expect to sound like this forever. “Art is life. And life is a continuous process,” he said, and later: “I might surprise myself. I don’t even know how I got to where I am right now.”
Not everyone likes it, and he says that suits him. Some listeners take to the sound at once. Others, in his own word, find it ugly. “When you are doing something really important and quite different, you don’t expect everybody to like it.”
What he wants from the music is modest and oddly specific. “Like even years to come, I want people to listen to my song and still feel relief and have a connection with the soul when they hear it.” The word he keeps coming back to is refreshing.
Staying in Kumasi
There is an old belief in Ghanaian music that an artist has to move to Accra to be taken seriously. Kwartengg is not worried about it. His view is that the internet has dealt with the problem. A song recorded in a Kumasi studio goes to a distributor, lands on a playlist or a TikTok page, and can be in use abroad within days. He went to Accra to record “Out The Mud”, and he is still based in Kumasi.
What is next
His newest single is “Charging” with Beeztrap KOTM, released on 30 September 2026. The numbers are still small but they are moving: about 25,700 monthly listeners on Spotify, more than 800,000 plays on his main Audiomack account and 23,000 followers on Instagram.
Where to start
Start with “Out The Mud” and “Charging”. Then go back to Akatafour Dwom II, which takes 13 minutes, and to Ired if you want to hear where he began. You can preview all of it on his AfroYard profile.
