In the spring of 2016, a song built around an Afrobeat pulse nested inside a UK funky sample nested inside a dancehall groove became the most-streamed track in Spotify history. "One Dance" reached one billion individual streams by October of that year, and with it Wizkid became the first Nigerian artist to top the US Billboard Hot 100. The record was technically Drake's, released on his fourth studio album Views, but Wizkid co-wrote it, contributed to its production alongside Nineteen85, DJ Maphorisa, and Noah "40" Shebib, and his presence was the whole emotional temperature of the song. What happened next is the more interesting story: how Wizkid decided to use that momentum, what he built with it, and what that choice revealed about the impossible geometry of crossing over without being swallowed.
The two artists had arrived at "One Dance" through a specific chain of introductions. Wizkid's 2014 track "Ojuelegba," a quietly devastating song about growing up in a Lagos suburb, had caught the attention of UK grime artist Skepta, who brought it to Drake. The resulting remix, with Skepta and Drake both adding verses, was a cultural handshake between three scenes that rarely shared the same room. By early 2016, Drake and Wizkid were in the studio together properly, and "Come Closer" was recorded around the same time as "One Dance," though it was held back because the album was not ready. When it finally dropped in March 2017, produced by Nigerian beatmaker Sarz, whose Afrobeats expertise had been anchoring Lagos productions for years, it arrived as the lead single to Wizkid's major label debut: a 12-track project called Sounds from the Other Side, released on July 14, 2017, through Starboy Entertainment and RCA Records.
The record was a deliberate act of geography. Wizkid recorded sessions in Los Angeles with Ty Dolla $ign, in studios with Chris Brown, and reached across the Atlantic for Major Lazer's Diplo to handle production on "Naughty Ride." Back home, Sarz produced "Come Closer," "African Bad Gyal," and "Sexy." Dre Skull, who had shaped the sound of Jamaican dancehall for Popcaan and Vybz Kartel, handled "Daddy Yo." DJ Mustard, whose minimalist LA bounce had defined a strain of West Coast rap, worked on "Dirty Wine" with Ty Dolla $ign. The full producer roster, Sarz, Del B, Spellz, Dre Skull, DJ Mustard, Major Lazer, and the Picard Brothers, reads like a map of the sounds Wizkid was trying to triangulate between. Ghanaian singer Efya brought highlife warmth to "Daddy Yo." South African vocalist Bucie added house-music cadence to "All for Love." Trey Songz appeared on "Gbese." The album was, as one critic put it, Wizkid as "a globalist."
The critical response was warm but not uncomplicated. Pitchfork gave it 7.4 out of 10 and wrote that "Wizkid is primed to carry Afrobeats to great heights." Rolling Stone awarded three out of five stars, noting how the album turned "Afropop into a meeting point for a host of party-starting dance styles." But some Nigerian critics felt the record's center of gravity had shifted west, that the pursuit of a crossover audience had produced something more smoothed-out than the raw specificity of "Ojuelegba" or the dense Lagos street feeling of his 2014 album Ayo. One Pulse Nigeria review described it as "a well-crafted, one-dimensional pop dance project that is all about vibes than actual substance." That tension, between the album's real pleasures and its apparent ambitions, was the honest sound of a scene at a threshold. Wizkid himself acknowledged the friction when he told Billboard around the time of his RCA signing: "It's hard for me to describe what I do, since I work with rhythms from afrobeat, reggae, hip-hop, dance hall and others. I don't wanna be boxed in to any one genre."
That refusal of the box was both a creative statement and a strategic one. For decades, African music had been filed under "world music" by Western tastemakers and promoters, a category that, as live promoter Rob Hallett put it bluntly, amounted to "a fight to get Africa out of the world-music pigeonhole and into mainstream pop areas." SFTOS was Wizkid's most direct attempt to make that fight unnecessary by simply occupying pop space on pop terms. "Come Closer" won Song of the Year at the 2017 All Africa Music Awards. It racked up over 56 million streams before the full album even dropped. In 2017, Wizkid also became the first Afrobeats artist to sell out London's Royal Albert Hall, a moment that, by most accounts, opened the floodgates for Nigerian artists on international stages. The album debuted at number 107 on the US Billboard 200, modest by global pop standards but historic for an Afrobeats record.
What Sounds from the Other Side actually did was change the terms of the conversation for everyone who came after. Wizkid's SFTOS gave other artists a visible template for deliberate international ambition, and the "Afrobeats to the World" tag that critics and fans reached for in the years that followed was, in many ways, a description of what this album had already attempted. Davido, Burna Boy, and Tiwa Savage all signed with major international labels in the years that followed. Burna Boy's African Giant earned a Grammy nomination in 2019. Wizkid's own Made in Lagos, released in 2020, would go further and deeper, reaching the Billboard Hot 100 as a lead artist with "Essence" featuring Tems. But the architecture of that later success was laid in 2017, in a record that was willing to be impure, to reach outward, to let Sarz's Lagos percussion sit next to DJ Mustard's LA minimalism and call it one thing. The crossover was real. So was the cost. And both of those facts are part of the record.
