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African ChillZone 2

Fifty tracks from the second volume — and the one that leans hardest into West Africa's alternative scene rather than its chart stars.

10 African Cities With the Best Nightlife – Afrikanza

African ChillZone II

Where the fourth volume in this series is a survey of the continent and the third is largely South African, the second is a Lagos and Accra record. Its real subject is the alternative scene that grew up alongside mainstream afrobeats — artists who used the same rhythms but wrote stranger songs and produced them more adventurously.

Assembled around 2019, it caught several of those artists just before they became internationally significant, which makes it a genuinely useful document as well as a good listen.

What to listen for

Amaarae appears four times, which is the most prescient call on the list. Her voice — very high, deliberately unpolished, entirely her own — was an outlier in Ghanaian pop when these were recorded and has since become one of the most imitated sounds in the region. "Fluid" and "Spend Some Time" with Wande Coal are the picks.

Nonso Amadi also appears three times, and "Radio" is the best of them — a songwriter's record in a scene that mostly rewarded producers.

Show Dem Camp's "Love On Weekends" with Tomi Agape and LADIPOE is the Nigerian alt-rap entry, and the Palmwine Music series they came from is one of the best runs of records anyone made in Lagos that decade.

Wizkid's "Fever" and Burna Boy's "Another Story" with M.anifest are the two big names, and the Burna track is the political one — a history lesson about the founding of Nigeria set to a groove.

Tay Iwar's "SPACE" with Cruel Santino is the alté scene at its most fully realised, and Juls appears twice as the producer tying much of this together.

Omawumi's "Without You" and Jidenna's "Sufi Woman" are the outliers worth hearing.

Go deeper

Amaarae's The Angel You Don't Know is the essential album from this scene, and Show Dem Camp's Palmwine Music Vol. 2 is the essential compilation.

Juls as a producer is the thread to follow next — his work connects Accra, Lagos and London more thoroughly than any single artist's.

Why it reads as prescient: the set leans on the alternative end of West African music rather than the chart end, and several of those artists have since become the chart. Hearing them before the audience arrived is a useful reminder that the mainstream of a scene is usually assembled from its margins about three years later.

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