The album opens with the sound of a woman who has already won. Yemi Alade’s seventh studio record, “It’s Yemi Alade,” arrives with 15 tracks that move through highlife, afrobeats, disco, house and afropop. The Nigerian singer built her catalogue on songs that travel between African traditions and contemporary pop, and this record goes back to that starting point without repeating it.
Alade has spent over a decade collecting the kind of numbers that put her in a category of her own. “Johnny” became one of the most streamed African songs of its era. “Baddie,” “Africa” and “Oh My Gosh” followed, each one widening her reach. She has a GRAMMY win and billions of streams to her name. “It’s Yemi Alade” does not ignore any of that history. It uses it.
The record’s emotional core sits in love, life, resilience, identity and gratitude. Those themes are not abstract on this album. They show up in the production choices and in the voices she brought into the room. Don Jazzy, Bien, Teni, FAVE, Spyro and Jeriq all appear across the tracklist, and their contributions pull the record in different directions without breaking its center.
“Alhaja” arrives early and sets a specific tone. The track carries a sense of character and cultural familiarity that anchors the album in African musical heritage. It is a song that knows exactly where it comes from. “Titanium” works differently. It leans into strength and resilience, capturing someone who has taken pressure and come out more determined. The two songs sit at opposite ends of the record’s emotional range, and both land.
The album does not try to reinvent Yemi Alade. It does something more direct. She revisits the sounds that shaped her, adds what she has learned over years of global touring and recording, and turns that combination into something distinctly hers. The result feels less like a new direction and more like a homecoming.
That distinction matters. A homecoming record can easily become a nostalgia play, a collection of gestures toward a past that no longer fits. “It’s Yemi Alade” avoids that trap by treating the past as a foundation rather than a destination. The highlife rhythms and afropop structures that defined her early work are still present, but they carry new weight. The disco and house influences that show up across the album are not grafted on. They are integrated, the product of an artist who has spent years absorbing different sounds and figuring out how to make them work together.
Alade’s voice remains the constant. It moves easily between the conversational delivery of “Alhaja” and the more forceful register of “Titanium,” and it carries the record through its quieter moments as well. The collaborators give her room to work. Don Jazzy’s production instincts are all over the album, and the younger artists on the tracklist push her into fresh territory without ever overshadowing her.
For longtime listeners, “It’s Yemi Alade” is a reminder of what made her music travel in the first place. For new listeners, it works as an entry point, a record that shows the full range of what she does. The album does not announce its ambitions. It simply demonstrates them across 15 tracks, each one building on the last.
The record closes without a grand statement. It just ends, the way a strong album should, with the sense that Yemi Alade has said what she needed to say and left the rest for later. That restraint is part of what makes the record work. She has nothing left to prove, and she knows it.
According to Unorthodox Reviews.
