Tems and the Sound Nobody Had a Name For Yet
Before the features and the Grammys, there was a voice that Lagos didn't know what to do with. Then the world caught up.
The first time most people outside Nigeria heard Tems, it was on a feature. A verse on a Wizkid track, a Khalid collaboration, a moment on a Drake record. This is how it often works — the world finds an artist through someone else's door. But people who had been paying attention to Lagos already knew. There was a voice coming out of that city that didn't fit the usual categories, and it was only a matter of time before it went everywhere.
Temi Ebunoluwa Adeleke grew up in Lagos. She has described herself as someone who felt out of place in the music industry when she first started — too different, too hard to classify, making something that wasn't Afrobeats in the conventional sense but wasn't R&B either. When no label would take a chance on her, she released her debut EP "Mr Rebel" independently in 2018. The EP is worth revisiting. It announces a voice that already knew exactly what it was.
The Sound
Tems sits at a particular intersection that has become more recognisable now that she has named it for people, but which was genuinely uncommon in 2018. The Afrobeats production — the rhythms, the Lagos energy — is there. But her voice brings something slower, heavier, more rooted in soul and neo-soul. She cites Lauryn Hill, Asa, and D'Angelo as influences, and you can hear all three. What she built from those influences is entirely her own.
"Damages" from Mr Rebel is the track that showed what she could do. The sparse production, the space she leaves around her voice, the way she sits in a melody without rushing it — these are instincts, not techniques. You either have them or you don't.
The Features
The global pivot came through Wizkid's "Essence" in 2020. The track became something unusual in contemporary music — a slow, patient, deeply sensual song that found its way into every playlist, every wedding, every moment requiring that specific atmosphere. Tems' vocal performance on that track is not a feature in the conventional sense. She and Wizkid share the song equally. Her presence is not decorative. It is structural.
What "Essence" did was introduce her voice to people who were not already paying attention to Lagos. From there, the features came quickly — Drake's "Fountains," Khalid's "Know Your Worth," her placement on Beyoncé's Black Is King. Each one brought a different audience. Each audience found their way back to her solo work and found something more substantial waiting.
"If Orange Was a Place"
Her 2021 EP is the work that established what her solo artistry actually was on her own terms. The title is a synaesthesia — a colour translated into a feeling, a mood, an atmosphere. The production is warm and unhurried. Her voice is the centre of everything. "Higher" and "Crazy Tings" became cultural touchstones on their own, but the EP as a complete piece is worth listening to from start to finish.
It does something specific: it creates an emotional environment. You put it on and the room changes. This is not a technical description but it is the accurate one.
The Grammy
In 2023, Tems became the first African woman to win a Grammy, for her writing contribution to Beyoncé's "Be Alive." The cultural weight of that moment was significant — not just for her, but for what it represented about where the conversation around African music had arrived in the global industry. These are the records that change what is considered possible for the artists coming after.
Her album "Born in the Wild" arrived in 2024 and showed her taking more space, more risks, working with a wider canvas. The critical response was not uniformly enthusiastic — some found it less focused than her EP work — but it confirmed that she is an artist interested in growth rather than consolidation. That is not a small thing.
Why She Matters
Tems matters because she arrived in a moment when Afrobeats was becoming a global category and she refused to simply occupy that category. She insisted on being herself — on making music that was rooted in Lagos but not limited to any single sound. She showed that you could be from that world and be entirely singular within it.
For the diaspora, there is something specific in watching an artist from Lagos refuse to simplify herself for outside consumption. The voice, the references, the pace, the emotional register — none of it was adjusted to make it easier to place. The world had to come to the music on its own terms.
That is not a common outcome. It is the one worth celebrating.