Across Homeless, one finds a premium lyricist much aware of his powers. He reaches a pristine expression of the human condition simply because it’s there—language just a reach from his grasp. When writing appears to be so effortless, most times it’s because the writer has formed an affinity with their immediate surroundings, a psychological intimacy that supplies the appropriate canvas for their paintings to shine. Llona’s writing on Homeless reminds one of Nas on Illmatic, except he charts the interior rather than the bustling world. Still, he gives us a vivid impression of who he is outside of himself, and between these sparks of light, emerges a figure whose acceptance of his peculiarities makes him very real in a non-celebrity way.  

On ‘Still Scared’, he allows the listener into his deepest considerations, painting a series of images that would have passed as insecurity. But Llona doesn’t give in to nihilism, not yet anyway, but he hangs long in the balance for the listener to feel an intense pressure. Like a short story, suspended in the gallows until a force gives, and what could have swung either way now swings one way, and life changes forever. When Llona sings about being ‘stuck in the place where they can’t save us,’ he’s introduced tension in the first arc, throwing us to the battlefield of his fears. What does he arm us with?  

Not a lot, the imagery is still bleak, as he reminds us that after ‘running and running like a stray dog / death is the only thing that saves us.’ When the hook of ‘but here I am / I’d be lying if I said that I’m not scared,’ plays out, now I will remember the opened arms of my fellow concertgoers that Thursday night, a pose which reminds one of Leonidas in 300—such a pose of victory becomes ironic and more powerful because the rubble of its fight lies around. After the second arc’s deepening of the tension, he wraps the narrative by illuminating the reasons for his struggle—it’s a feeling akin to the picture of a loved one in the breast of a soldier, the smile which inspires him to return home. Brilliantly foreshadowing the direct word, he shows us his relation to them: ‘On my mama I was serving cold / even for my family I sabi ghost / always on my grind and my daddy knows’ and even in the face of the devil he had to confront, he reckons that ‘[I] no fit to dey unemployed / I no fit to dey insecure.’  

There is an intentionality on Llona’s part to become a beacon of the misunderstood. The visual association with a soldier works because there is a psychological tussle that comes with the profession, one that’s been the subject of many films and books. It’s a narrative alliance that’s directly played into ‘Commander,’ the low-tuned salvo with the similarly evocative Wizard Chan. An exchange of purist energies, Llona’s delivery oscillates between a rapper’s bravado and the subtle vocal inflections of Patois. When he flows into the hook, it’s softened into a singer’s tenderness—he does all this in a matter of seconds. ‘Listen commander is speaking, I’m here for a reason / Cannot drop your weapon you know that’s a fucking treason,’ he says in the opening bars, again revealing the specificity of his diction. It’s a selection of words with the right sounds and suggestions. He again strikes that balance with the well-timed ‘welcome to the circle where we making love with violence,’ just some distance away from inferring that ‘you can be a soldier but you cannot die in silence’.  

On ‘Can’t Breathe’, he promises to ‘carry [his] gun and shoot’ those that want to hold him down. Llona understands that the glory of triumph rests on the strength of these challenges; he doesn’t undermine the opposition. It weighs him down, but a soldier must rise. ‘Until death all defeat is psychological,’ goes a popular quote one finds around social media, and it’s exactly the same for the Kano-raised artist. Homeless is a collection of battle portraits. It is an exhibition of scars and more scars. But it is also a gallery of transcendence, one where the character walks out of the battle and continues to live.  

Fortunately, Llona doesn’t make the reprieve this straightforward. He shapes up the contours, creating songs like ‘Comforter’ and ‘Stranger’ that give more colour to his struggles. The former is a stark depiction of his vices, particularly the lapse into the warm embrace of weed. From Burna Boy’s ‘Smoke Some Weed’ to Jesse Jagz’s ‘Burning Bush’, it has been a tradition within Nigerian music, and Llona’s addition to its canon burnishes it with even more interiority. Rather than glorify its undeniable succour, he makes the pleasure complex by letting us know that he had ‘[no] comforter/ when I had nobody just to call brother, call my mama say her pikin dun suffer / only my dealer be my comforter’. The latter song crafts the quintessential love dilemma, evading specificity but giving us just enough details, and in one line, Llona tellingly asks, ‘but do I gotta say these things before you believe?’  

Some young people fall in love with such characters. They are like outliers who cling to the extremes of societal acceptance, whose portrayal of their struggles makes them misunderstood. Because they have a wholesome understanding of their wounds and do not necessarily hate the circumstances that have shaped them, they come across as strange. All these heft become the backstory, the events of the battlefield that our protagonist would one day tell. 

On records such as ‘Billion Paper’ and ‘HBP (Remix)’ with Bella Shmurda, Llona resurrects the external, giving life to the influencers of his fight. Whereas the latter establishes why he must succeed, adopting a rugged perspective of the industry’s workings, the former allows him to enter a dream state, even if briefly, musing on what financial success would afford him. Even then, his perspective is wholesome because he essentially infers that he would protect his personal space better. ‘Gangsta Love Letter’ reiterates this sense of distance, a finely styled love letter that progresses from feeling blessed about his life to becoming an extension of that love, the sort of grace only a gangster could extend. Gangster, in this case, being one who’s been rugged in their fight and who ‘don’t hurt nobody [but] love forever’. Nwosu ‘Che’ Uchechukwu reckons that the most impressive weapon in Llona’s arsenal is the precision of his songwriting. He says: 

He is able to properly articulate his feelings. Knowing Llona personally is like knowing his songs, ‘cos everything that he has said in his songs, he has told me the story before, or I’ve witnessed the story. And he brings it exactly how it happens to him. He’s able to bring out perfectly what he feels and put in the music.