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Producer Series: P2J

Thirty-seven tracks from the London producer who worked out how to make Afrobeats, British R&B and American pop sound like one genre. P2J is the connective tissue.

The producer behind the modern Afro-fusion sound

P2J — Peter Adarkwah — is a British producer of Ghanaian heritage whose work sits at the exact point where London R&B, West African pop and American mainstream production meet. He is one of the principal architects of the sound that carried Afrobeats onto global radio, and his most visible credit is Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift, where he was among the key producers.

His signature is warmth and space. Where a lot of Afrobeats production is dense, P2J records tend to leave gaps — a bassline, a percussion pattern, a chord or two, and a great deal of air around the vocal. That restraint is why his tracks travel so easily between genres.

What to listen for

Burna Boy's "JA ARA E" is from The Lion King: The Gift and is the clearest example of the method — enormous space, a lyric of real bite, and production that never crowds the singer.

Jorja Smith's "Little Things" is his biggest streaming record, and one of the best examples anywhere of a UK garage-inflected groove serving a soul vocal.

The Skip Marley "Slow Down" remixes appear twice — one with H.E.R. alone, one adding Davido and Oxlade — and comparing them is a useful lesson in how much a remix can reframe a song.

"Wasted Energy" with Alicia Keys and Diamond Platnumz is the pan-continental one, and Stormzy's "Hide & Seek" shows him working with British rap's biggest figure.

Wizkid's "Après Minuit" with French-Congolese rapper Tiakola brings in the francophone scene, which is enormous and almost entirely absent from anglophone playlists.

Tamera appears twice, and Jamilah Barry's COLORS session is the most stripped-back thing here — a good look at what he does when almost everything is removed.

Go deeper

The Lion King: The Gift (2019) is the essential document. It was criticised in places as an outsider's curation of African music, and the debate is worth engaging with — but the record put a great many African artists in front of an audience that would never otherwise have heard them.

Burna Boy's African Giant and Wizkid's Made in Lagos are the albums this production style helped build.

And follow Ari PenSmith, his frequent writing partner — the two of them together account for a surprising share of the last decade's best crossover records.

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