Yemi Alade, In Her Own Name
It is a blazing noon in the second week of March 2026 when the Grammy-nominated artist Yemi Alade presses record on a “Get Ready With Me” video. She begins with a meditative hook, her eyes closed, her hands pressed together solemnly. In the same measured succession, she works moisturising cream into her face before turning to address her fans about a newfound frustration.
As the video progresses, it moves between whimsy and casual seriousness, but the plea remains. She tells her fans she has been struggling to settle on a title for her forthcoming album and, in an unusual gesture, decides to hand the power of naming it over to them. There is a condition: the privilege belongs to those who have been there from the beginning, fans who have followed her since her earliest days, watched her move through nine different projects and stayed to witness every evolution. They, she believes, are the ones who should have a say in what comes next.
It would be 152 days before she reappeared, in an old Victorian-style house, wearing a cowrie-woven dress and an enigmatic shoulder-padded coat, her signature afro mohawk in place. Behind her, a suited orchestra, as she announced the title and release date of her seventh studio album, “It’s Yemi Alade“.
Yemi Alade, musician, entrepreneur, actor and humanitarian, has moved through several evolutions over the course of her career, each one revealing a different shade of the woman behind the music. From her 2014 debut, “King of Queens”, whose single “Johnny” pushed her almost forthrightly towards global stardom, there has always been something electrifying about her, something too expressive, too alive to ignore.
Twelve years on, the names have accumulated: Mama Africa, Woman of Steel, Empress and Rebel Queen, each with its own visual and sonic language, and perhaps a distinct version of Yemi Alade. She has worn them boldly, on stages, at award ceremonies and across collaborations with some of the biggest names in music.
The revealing thing about these evolutions is that they were never part of a grand design. Alade did not set out to claim an identity or carefully manufacture the woman the world would come to know as Mama Africa. Much of the journey, she insists, has been guided by something far less calculated: love. “For me as a musician and creative, I’ve always just loved music, and have always gone where the love is,” she says. “I never, at any point in my life, decided, ‘Oh, I will start dressing African or Nigerian so that people can know that I’m African.’ It was never a plan. It was never intentional.”
Instead, she followed the warmth wherever it appeared. She moved along the routes that opened themselves to her, letting her fans define their own relationship with her rather than deciding in advance who she should be for them. It is perhaps why she resists the language of markets and demographics. “I honestly struggle with the idea of saying, ‘This is my market, that’s my market.’ People are the ones who go ahead and embrace me and do all those things. I don’t look at it that way.”
Speaking a week before the album’s release, she tells me from Atlanta that “It’s Yemi Alade” emerged from a shortlist of thirty and was, in the end, the title that resonated most, for two reasons. “I feel like every great musician has, at one point in their life, named an album after themselves,” she says. “Most times when people walk up to me, they just start singing my name. So who are the people singing? It’s the fans. At the end of the day, the fans are taking the front row on this particular project.”
A few things stand out about the album. For one, it is a 16-track project that took her three years, with most of the songwriting and production done in the last two. It also returns her to the core of her sound, highlife, this time imagined through a fusion with disco, something she describes as finding an intricate element in the techno of a summer rave in Ibiza.
Perhaps the most compelling thing about “It’s Yemi Alade” is not the experimentation with new sounds and flows but the character and delivery Alade brings to it, which pull the record towards the vision she had for it. For her, it is the storytelling that threads every detail together. The album moves across multiple genres and brings in other voices, including Don Jazzy, Bien, Spyro, Jeriq, Fave, Njerae and Sofiya Nzau. But for Alade, the beauty is in the message. “It’s me having fun, reminding my people of where we’re coming from and giving them an idea of what the future holds,” she says.
More than fifteen years have passed since her debut single, “Fimisile”, and she could be credited as one of the artists who spearheaded the second wave of Afrobeats. She has watched the genre rise in real time, and that history gives her room to critique it, to weigh what it has become against what it might still be missing.
She knows, first, that the loyalty audiences give the music, and the people who make it, can feel remarkably short-lived. Afrobeats might have found its listeners across the world, but the culture of preservation that allows music to become inheritance remains uneven. “I’ve always looked at our industry and sometimes it makes me shake my head,” she says. “I find that it’s not just the industry alone, but even the stakeholders in the industry and the listeners, the audience, don’t know how to treasure our classics. Classics in terms of music, and even classics in terms of our legends. We don’t know how to treasure them.”
She contrasts this with the music cultures of America and Europe, where longevity can be its own kind of currency. Artists in their seventies can still fill stadiums; songs decades old can return to the radio with the strange freshness of something released yesterday. There is a continuity there, an invisible thread connecting generations of listeners to the music that came before them. But on the continent, and in Nigeria specifically, she reaches for a metaphor: “It sometimes feels as though we like chewing gum,” she says. “We just want to eat a new piece of chewing gum, enjoy it, and when we’re done with the sweetness, we throw it away.”
The problem, she argues, is not exclusive to music. It reflects a broader value system around African creativity, where the creator can become invisible almost as quickly as the creation itself. “So I feel like the value system in Nigeria, in Africa, for our creatives, not just music, but art and everything, is very low, if not close to zero,” she says. “We need to create more value for our music, our creatives and the creators themselves.”
That value, she believes, cannot be built on audience behaviour alone. There must first be a structure capable of sustaining it. Perhaps the global movement of African music offers an opportunity to change that. But Alade is wary of confusing visibility with progress. Afrobeats may now travel effortlessly across borders, but international recognition does not automatically create the systems required to sustain artists at home. For her, change is only possible when action is taken. “We can hope from now until kingdom come, but if action isn’t being taken towards creating those systems, then honestly, there is no hope.”
Until those structures exist, her advice is practical: artists should not wait for an industry to save them. “I would advise anybody out there: as long as systems are not available, get what you can and plan your own future,” she says.
That future has manifested in the form of Yem Beauty, a brand she launched in 2025 after four years of development. It is, in many ways, another extension of the instinct that has guided her music career: to create something that feels distinctly hers while remaining attentive to the people who receive it. She made the formula vegan, she says, because she wanted more than the language of clean beauty; she wanted care, to be sure that what she puts her name behind is safe, considered and healthy for the people who use it.
She has also been refining her entry into fashion, which comes as little surprise: she is a fashion obsessive in both theory and practice. She tells me about the recently concluded Africa Fashion Week London, where Yem Beauty was the official lip partner and where she showed her exclusive collection, “Heritage”, in partnership with the ready-to-wear label Zephans & Co. The Heritage collection was presented in honour of the Queen of Ife, HRH Queen Aderonke Ademiluyi-Ogunwusi, and marked the first time Alade walked the runway as a designer. “It feels good to be able to wear several hats at the same time, whether music, fashion or makeup. And who’s to tell what’s to come?” she asks.
Before she speaks of the future, she offers a confession about her becoming: as an ever-dreaming child, she never quite pictured herself on this path. It is almost amusingly human to hear from an artist whose career has grown to such proportions. She is, however, full of gratitude that she let herself go where the music led.
Looking ahead, her ambitions are surprisingly grounded. Before the albums, the tours or the expanding businesses, there is the simple hope of being alive and healthy. Beyond that, she imagines Yem Beauty becoming a household name, growing into a global beauty company offering a range of products to customers around the world. The foundations for that future, she says, are already being laid, with distribution networks being developed to meet the demand.
Music, naturally, remains woven into the picture. In another decade, she hopes there might be another five or six albums, followed by more touring, which she both loves and dreads. “I always look forward to tours, but the minute I start the tour, I want to stop,” she laughs. “It’s a lot of work that just hits you at the same time. You’re in a different country almost every 24 hours, or a different city every 24 hours.”
For all its demands, Alade remains grateful for the scale of the experience. She knows that only a fraction of musicians will ever know what it means to tour at that level, and that awareness seems to temper the exhaustion with wonder.
Perhaps this is the quieter future she is really asking for, not a life defined by more accolades, but one in which she can finally inhabit the life she has spent years building. There is a freedom in that desire. Musicians, she points out, are often expected to measure their lives through the familiar currencies of success: awards, records, sold-out shows and recognition. But behind those markers is a person who also wants something far less measurable: the space to live for herself, to enjoy her own life away from the gaze that has followed her for more than a decade.
It is perhaps the hardest part of becoming Yemi Alade: learning to remain connected to the girl who dreamed before any of this existed, while carrying the weight of the woman the world has since come to know. And after more than a decade of doing both, she seems to be asking for permission to simply be.