Wizkid released Made in Lagos on 30 October 2020, two weeks after its scheduled date, because Nigeria was in the streets. The #EndSARS protests against police brutality had consumed the country's attention, and Wizkid, who had announced an October 15 release, held the album back and joined marchers in London instead. That act of solidarity is part of the album's meaning, even though the record itself carries no protest music. What it carries is something more considered: a sustained argument, across 14 tracks, that Lagos can be the emotional center of a global pop album without bending to what global pop usually demands.
The consensus reading of Made in Lagos runs something like this: it is a beautiful, mid-tempo Afrobeats record that produced "Essence," which featured Tems, which got a Justin Bieber remix on 13 August 2021, which peaked at number nine on the Billboard Hot 100 and became the first Nigerian song in history to chart on both the Hot 100 and the Billboard Global 200. That trajectory is real and worth celebrating. But when "Essence" becomes the whole story, the rest of the album gets flattened into a prelude, and that flattening misses what Wizkid and executive producer P2J actually built. The Nigerian-British producer, born Richard Olowaranti Mbu Isong, handled the majority of the album's production, and in interviews he described a shared vision with Wizkid of merging genres without letting any single one dominate. The result is an album whose beats Stereogum called "meticulously complex," and whose production Pitchfork's Joey Akan described as "mid-tempo" in a way that reads as observation rather than criticism. The tempo was the point.
The album's guest list alone signals how wide Wizkid was casting. Burna Boy appears on "Ginger," the second track, bringing a low-slung confidence that sits naturally inside P2J's production. Skepta takes "Longtime," the third track, somewhere colder and more angular. H.E.R. features on "Smile," which was released on 16 July 2020 as the album's lead single and later appeared on Barack Obama's 2020 summer playlist. Ella Mai joins on "Piece of Me." These are not cameos assembled for commercial reach. Each guest occupies a distinct register, and P2J's production holds them all inside the same sonic room without flattening the differences between them.
The deepest thread running through Made in Lagos is a conversation between West Africa and the Caribbean, and it is more deliberate than it first sounds. Wizkid had been working toward this fusion since at least his December 2019 EP SoundMan Vol. 1, where a track with Chronixx tested the intersection of Afrobeats and reggae. On Made in Lagos, those experiments matured into something with full ownership. "Reckless," the opener, sets the tone immediately: P2J's production lays percussion and melody together while Wizkid moves between registers, the rhythmic traditions sitting together without either one translating the other. "Blessed," the fifth track, deepens this with Damian "Jr. Gong" Marley, whose verse brings the kind of introspective, roots-reggae gravity that lifts the song beyond a simple collaboration. Then there is "True Love," the ninth track, produced by Juls, one of the few tracks not under P2J's hand, where Tay Iwar's pre-chorus floats into a cushion of warm production before Jamaican reggae vocalist Projexx takes the song somewhere else entirely. That song is the album's quiet peak, and it rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as "Essence."
Critics who found the album too uniform were hearing the coherence and calling it monotony. The sequencing is part of the argument. Each track flows into the next without relying on matched melodic transitions, a harder thing to achieve than it sounds. Wizkid was making a room you stay in. P2J described his approach as infusing African music into whatever genre he touched, whether R&B, house, pop, or rap, and on Made in Lagos that philosophy produces a specific kind of production gravity: the bass lines are low and deliberate, the horns arrive as punctuation rather than flourish, and the live instrumentation gives the whole record a warmth that purely programmed Afropop often lacks. The Recording Academy's Morgan Enos called it "a mix of Afrobeats and R&B," which is accurate but undersells the Caribbean architecture underneath.
There is also the question of what the album cost Wizkid to make, in terms of patience and public pressure. He first teased the project as far back as 2018, and what followed were years of missed dates, fan frustration, and a string of singles including "Joro" and "Ghetto Love" that kept the appetite alive without satisfying it. When the album finally arrived, it reached number one on the Billboard World Albums chart and earned a nomination at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards for Best Global Music Album. The Guardian's Kate Hutchinson gave it four stars and named it his most sophisticated record yet. Those recognitions confirmed what the music had already argued: that an album built on restraint, on low tempos and saxophone and Caribbean-Lagos dialogue, could find its own kind of global reach.
"Essence" is a good story. Tems's performance on that track is extraordinary, and the song's rise from album cut to Billboard history is one of the more satisfying arcs in recent Afrobeats. But Made in Lagos earns its reputation across all fourteen tracks, in the way "Mighty Wine" seduces with a saxophone before you have noticed it happening, in the way "Grace" closes everything down with a quiet gratitude that feels earned rather than performed. The album arrived while Nigeria was protesting, while Wizkid was in London marching, and it offered a sound that knew exactly where it came from and was in no hurry to prove itself to anyone.
