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Rema VibeZ

Twenty-four tracks from an artist who was a teenager when he signed and is now responsible for one of the most-streamed African songs ever recorded.

Rema

Divine Ikubor is from Benin City, Nigeria, and was discovered by D'Prince — brother of the producer Don Jazzy — after posting a freestyle over a Mavin Records instrumental. He was signed to Jonzing World under Mavin at seventeen.

What he brought was a genuinely new hybrid. Rema's melodies draw on Indian and Arabic scales as much as on West African ones — he has spoken about growing up on Bollywood soundtracks — and he calls the result Afrorave. Whether or not the label sticks, the melodic sensibility is unmistakably his.

"Calm Down," particularly in its Selena Gomez remix, became a global phenomenon and one of the most-streamed songs of its era, making him the most internationally visible Nigerian artist of his generation.

What to listen for

"Dumebi" is the record that broke him and still the purest distillation of the early sound.

"Calm Down" is the phenomenon, and it is worth hearing on its own terms — a gentle, almost weightless record that succeeded by being the opposite of a banger.

"Soundgasm" and "Peace Of Mind" are the better songs, and "Peace Of Mind" appears here twice — the second in a Virgil Abloh remix built with Fela Kuti material, which is a genuinely strange and moving artefact given Abloh's death in 2021.

"Woman" and "Ginger Me" show the melodic range, and "Corny" and "Dirty" the harder edge.

The international collaborations map his reach: FKA twigs on "jealousy," Chris Brown on "Time N Affection," Don Toliver on "Secondhand," and Justine Skye on "Twisted Fantasy." The FKA twigs pairing is the most artistically interesting by a distance.

"HOV" and "Oroma Baby" are the deeper cuts.

Go deeper

Rave & Roses (2022) is the album, and HEIS (2024) is the harder, stranger follow-up that surprised people.

The Mavin Records roster is worth knowing: Don Jazzy as an executive has developed an extraordinary share of Nigerian pop, including Ayra Starr, Crayon and Johnny Drille.

And for the Bollywood melodic influence he cites, the playback singers of Hindi cinema — Lata Mangeshkar, Mohammed Rafi, Asha Bhosle — are a whole world worth entering.

One last note on the melodic sources. The Indian and Arabic scales Rema reaches for are not decoration — they are why his melodies resolve somewhere your ear does not expect, and they are the single most identifiable thing about him. Afrorave may or may not survive as a genre name, but the hybrid it describes is real and has already been widely copied.

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