Obongjayar is creating his own paradise
After head-turning slots alongside Fred again.. and Little Simz, the magnetic, shape-shifting singer is ready to become a star on his second album, ‘Paradise Now’
Playing to 70,000 at the LA Coliseum is just the same as a gig down the pub, according to Obongjayar. It’s all just performance.
“There’s no such thing as being ready for it,” the singer tells Rolling Stone UK, asked how he prepared for the enormous 2024 cameo alongside Fred again.. and coming out with Little Simz on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage two weeks later. “No matter how many rehearsals you do, if you ain’t got it then you ain’t got it,” he says with his signature grin. “If you have it, you’re gonna be it.”
This idea – of doing rather than thinking and inhabiting your most instinctive self – is central to the singer’s fantastic, star-making second album Paradise Now, announced today and due out May 30. The Nigerian-born, London-based musician, born Steven Umoh but introducing himself as OB when we meet in Shoreditch in early March, has been making music as Obongjayar for the last decade, but feels on the cusp of a real breakthrough in 2025.
His debut album Some Nights I Dream of Doors, released in 2022, mixed the sounds of his childhood in Africa with occasional singer-songwriter tendencies, an eye for perfect pop music and a striking ability to make all this shape-shifting feel entirely natural and cohesive. One of the album’s best songs, ‘I Wish It Was Me’, was then picked up and interpolated by Fred again.. on 2023 smash ‘adore u’. At festivals and stadium shows across the globe, Obongjayar made star turns while performing the track alongside Fred.
He’s also become a key collaborator for Little Simz, appearing on the 2021 track ‘Point and Kill’ and again on her new single ‘Flood’. On Paradise Now, she lends a delightfully nonchalant verse to ‘Talk Olympics’, a frantic and fantastic rejection of the cyclical chatter of social media.
If Some Nights presented all the different styles and voices Obongjayar could inhabit, it’s Paradise Now that sees these elements heightened, tweaked and perfected. It’s by far the most authentic, catchy and well-written version of the singer we’ve been presented so far.
“Part of growing is recognising who you are and how you speak your language, and being able to distill your perspective into the simplest form without diluting it,” he says of the aim with the new album. “That was the crux of this record – distilling, not diluting. It’s the purest form of the idea, in a way a toddler or your grandma can understand.”
Paradise Now opens on a fraught note, with the singer reflecting on past trauma and trying to find a path forwards on first track ‘It’s Time’. “I can’t keep running away,” he sings, reflecting on “carrying arrows in my flesh” from the “hurricane” of his past. ‘Life Ahead’ then places us at the dinner table during a family Christmas, with the singer trying to “wear a smile for [his mother] like there’s nothing wrong,” before working out “how to tell them I’m still fucked up”.
Across the second track, he sings the chorus in a sweet, soft and melodic voice, before the verse – an internal monologue of sorts – is delivered in a harsher and sharper spoken word. Across the album, Obongjayar uses his truly stunning range of voices to inhabit a host of conflicting characters, all of them full of feeling. It’s his not-so-secret weapon and shows him to be one of the best and most dextrous vocalists around.
“When I make music, I allow myself the freedom to express,” he says. “I didn’t learn a particular way of singing or recording. It’s the bravery and confidence to allow myself to just do it if I feel it, rather than put barriers within myself that I don’t allow myself to cross.” These different voices – whether he’s defiant and excitable on ‘Not In Surrender’, sultry and in his body on new single ‘Sweet Danger’ or angry and fired up on the Rishi Sunak diss track ‘Jellyfish’ – are equally impactful and all delivered with dynamite precision.
He says: “If you’re angry, you tend to shout or yell – your cadence changes. If you’re trying to court someone, you’re speaking in a different tone. It’s all about if it feels true. I can sing a run and do Beyoncé-style singing, and I can like it, but it’s not true to me. It’s not how I sing. It doesn’t sound honest and doesn’t represent what I’m trying to get across.”
The internal conflict within Obongjayar is presented most beautifully on album track ‘Born in This Body’, a simple, stripped-back song about reaching acceptance within yourself. “I post a pic for the digital / If only they could see what’s in my mind,” he says of the common yet still troubling Instagram-vs-reality conundrum, later looking back on his six-year-old self “[telling] my grandma I’m ugly”.
Initially conceived after a conversation with his mixed race friend about their struggle for identity and belonging, the song wrestles with “the war in yourself” yet presents it through music that sounds like reaching a blissful peace. “I’m Nigerian born and raised in Nigeria but now I live in the UK,” he tells us. “I’m making music that is not necessarily ‘Nigerian’ or ‘African’ music, and it’s not ‘British’ music. So you’re confused. There’s confusion that rises through you as a person, but that’s who you are. Ask my mummy, I was born in this body,” he says, quoting the song’s chorus. “This is who I am from the beginning. That’s the person I express to the world. My mum will tell you that, because she gave birth to me.”
It’s an unflinching honesty that defines the whole record, and presents Obongjayar in all his fantastic contradictions. “I went into the record knowing exactly the idea I wanted to communicate,” he says. “I didn’t want to hide my sentiments or my emotion, and I didn’t want to try to be anything. I didn’t want to try to be cool, or try and be a fucking profound poet. If that’s what I am, then cool, but I feel like once you try to become a thing, you’ve already lost. You’ve lost the honesty and the truth behind the thing you’re trying to do. In turn, you lose the sentiment.”
As well as his new album, Paradise Now is also the name of a series of parties Obongjayar launched in 2024 and that started while the album was being finished. Hosted at new south London spot Ormside Projects in an industrial corner of Bermondsey, the events have seen him perform proto versions of album tracks with his band as well as welcoming peers from across the genre spectrum to perform, including Lava La Rue, Wu-Lu, John Glacier, Sam Akpro and more.
Head down to one of the nights and you’ll see OB making new friends in the smoking area or deep in the music on the dancefloor. “People see you for who you are, and there’s no hiding – you can’t pretend,” he says, connecting the dots between the party’s ethos and the core concept of the new album. After the parties, he’ll often end up hosting an afters at his flat with fans.
For him, Paradise Now as an overarching concept is about “enjoying and being content with the beauty that exists now, rather than looking forward or reminiscing”. Though the phrase it might be read as a demand, he sees it as an acceptance and an understanding.
With this binding concept, Obongjayar sees his future – whether he becomes a fully fledged star or remains a critics’ favourite – as being in the hands of others. In all of his biggest moments so far, be it at the Coliseum or on the Pyramid Stage, he looks and sounds every inch the modern pop star. With Paradise Now, he now has the songs to back it up.
On the album’s best track, 2024 single ‘Just My Luck’, he sings over an irresistibly catchy beat about always finding himself on the outside of the conversation looking in. It used to frustrate him, but he now sees the power in carving out your own space away from existing movements or aesthetics. “I want to be part of the band,” he says at the song’s outset, before later deciding that you “don’t need a crowd to s-s-set yourself on fire” and realises instead that, if he builds it, they will likely come.
“I’m in the wrong place, making a good time,” he later sings in that gorgeous falsetto, appreciating the paradise of now and inviting everyone else in should they choose to join. “I’m not imagining a new world,” he affirms, with that grin coming out once again. “I’m in the new world and I’m trying to show it to you.”