The Exuberance of Rema

What exactly is Rema’s latest album, HEIS? Is it noise, music, rage, rave? Afro rage? Afro metal? 

A video on YouTube—the EA FIFA 21 Performance—shows twenty-year-old Rema in a different element. For many of his day-one fans, Rema was a poster boy of a kind of fusion of Trap music and Afrobeats, and a music avatar of a rising demographic of young Nigerians, specifically Gen Z, associated with the kind of art predominantly influenced by technoculture and cyberpunk, as exemplified in his first project, the Freestyle EP (2019).  

He has retained this latter identity while effacing the former. In his new album HEIS, he brings back a lot of synths in his soundscape (a characteristic of cyberpunk), which he had suspended after the single ‘Dumebi’. In Rema’s former identification, it appears he could go on singing—or rapping—forever; it felt like his perfect element, which many would have assumed was a style he’d identify with or pursue. But he didn’t. Although he had posted on X in April 2022, that he had to ‘bring back Trap Rema fr,’ in the deluxe of his debut Rave & Roses, we didn’t see that either...