Why Nigeria’s New Sound Keeps Inventing Its Own Genres

There’s a particular kind of sentence you’ll hear at a Lagos listening party these days: “It’s not drill, it’s Afro-cultist.” “It’s not trap-gospel, it’s Afro-Adura.” “It’s not house, it’s Afro-Piano.” Each time, the music underneath is instantly recognisable to anyone who’s spent time with UK drill, Atlanta trap, or a South African piano set. What’s less recognisable — deliberately so — is the label stuck on top of it.

This is the current texture of Nigeria’s new wave, and it’s happening everywhere at once: Lagos as the loudest room, but with Ibadan, Benin City, Abuja and the North all feeding a sound that has splintered far past what “Afrobeats” was ever built to describe. The music has grown faster than the vocabulary around it — or rather, the industry keeps building new vocabulary rather than borrowing the vocabulary that already exists.

The naming reflex

Rema is probably the clearest case study. In 2021, tired of his sound being mocked online as “Indian” or “Arabian,” he declared on social media that his music would from then on be known as Afrorave — a sub-genre of Afrobeat, sealed by his forthcoming album. The reaction split fans and critics: some read it as visionary branding, others as an artist refusing to simply say his music borrowed from Bollywood strings and rave synths and leave it there. The word itself is adapted from Benin City slang — which is its own kind of interesting, since it roots a genre name in a specific street vocabulary rather than a musical description.

Odumodublvck is the more extreme version of the same instinct. His sound is, by his own account and by most critics’ ears, a direct fusion of highlife, Afrobeat, Afro-fusion, straightforward hip-hop, and UK drill. Yet the language built around him leans away from “drill” and toward invented terms — Afro Drill and Grime,” pioneered inside his Anti-World Gangstas camp — and at points something closer to myth-making, with commentators coining “Afro-cultist” for a style he himself first called Okporoko rhymes. Drill is drill wherever it’s rapped from; what’s being renamed here isn’t the sound, it’s the address the sound gets filed under.

Then there’s Afro-Adura, arguably the defining street sound of the last three years, carried by Asake, Seyi Vibez, T.I Blaze, Zinoleesky, the late Mohbad and Barry Jhay. Boomplay, the streaming platform that helped popularise the term, described it as music for the street, made by the street, built around introspective and motivational lyrics. Musically, it’s a trap-and-gospel hybrid with fuji percussion underneath — a lineage you could just as easily describe using genre names that already exist in gospel rap and street trap elsewhere in the world. Instead, the industry reached for a Yoruba word for prayer and built a new genre wing around it. Alongside it sits Street-Hop, a resurgence of an older Nigerian rap tradition that has, in its current form, absorbed amapiano, trap and dancehall influences — three genres with well-established global names — and still gets marketed as something native and singular.

Reclaiming the naming rights

None of this happens in a vacuum. It’s a direct reaction to what Afrobeats itself has become: a catch-all so wide it now flattens everything African into one marketing tag. The term was coined in the UK in 2012 as a way to bundle disparate West African sounds together for an outside audience, and it stuck — to the point that Ghanaian, South African and Nigerian artists alike now find themselves boxed into a label that erases what actually makes their music distinct. Ghanaian singer King Promise has said publicly that being filed under Afrobeats robs artists of their specificity, even while acknowledging why Western markets prefer the shorthand. Tyla’s “bittersweet” reaction to winning a Best Afrobeats award for a record that’s really amapiano is the same complaint from the other direction.

Seen that way, the genre-naming reflex isn’t just vanity or marketing noise — it’s the same defensive move Afrobeats itself made a decade ago, just fought at street level instead of continental level. If the outside world is going to keep flattening Nigerian music into one umbrella term regardless of what’s actually happening underneath it, then naming your own corner of the sound — Afrorave, Afro-Adura, Afro-cultist — becomes a way of planting a flag before someone else plants it for you, and possibly names it wrong or credits it to someone else entirely.

Rema said as much at the 2023 Headies, in a moment that reads less like ego and more like an artist thinking about institutional legacy: he urged the industry to keep supporting its own institutions during what he called a sensitive period, warning that Afrorave, Afro-this, Afro-that would all eventually be filed under one Afrobeats award anyway, and that this window wouldn’t come again. Even the artist most associated with genre-renaming was, in that moment, admitting the renaming might not hold.

The cost of not aligning

But there’s a real cost to this reflex, and it’s worth naming plainly. When every hybrid gets a new “Afro-” compound instead of being placed against the global genre family it actually belongs to, Nigerian music loses something too: legibility. A drill record filed as “Afro-cultist” doesn’t get discussed alongside UK and Brooklyn drill in the way a genuinely connected lineage should allow. A gospel-trap record filed as “Afro-Adura” doesn’t get read against the American South’s long history of trap-gospel crossover. Critics at home have made this point before — one widely shared piece on the wave of Rema-and-Fireboy-era sub-genres asked outright whether these were serious musical categories or, in effect, just name tags with no real bearing on the industry’s future.

There’s also a flattening risk baked into the opposite direction: casual listeners abroad, and even some critics, still use Afrobeats and Amapiano almost interchangeably despite Amapiano being its own distinct fusion of deep house, kwaito, jazz and lounge, born in South Africa, not Nigeria. Nigeria’s habit of coining rather than aligning doesn’t cause that confusion, but it doesn’t help resolve it either — it adds another layer of bespoke terminology onto a landscape that’s already struggling to be read accurately from outside.

Where that leaves the new wave

The sound coming out of Lagos, Ibadan, Benin City and Abuja right now is genuinely new — genuinely a hybrid, genuinely worth its own attention. The argument here isn’t that Afro-Adura or Afrorave are illegitimate labels, or that Odumodublvck should simply be called a drill rapper and nothing more. It’s that the industry’s instinct to name first and connect second is really a naming rights battle dressed up as genre theory — an attempt to control the story before Afrobeats-as-umbrella, or the international press, or a streaming platform’s algorithm, does it for them.

Whether that’s a winning long-term strategy is still an open question. Genre names that don’t connect to anything a global listener already recognises tend to have a shorter shelf life than the music itself — see how quickly “Afroswing” and “Afrobashment” collapsed into just Afroswing, or how “Afro-fusion” already reads as a placeholder rather than a genre. Nigeria’s new sound doesn’t need permission from London or Atlanta to exist. But if it wants the credit for the drill verses, the trap-gospel hooks, and the house basslines it’s genuinely built on, it may need to stop renaming them and start being named alongside them.