What do you do after you’ve made the first Afrobeats song to top U.S. radio , the first to earn more than a billion streams on Spotify as a track led by an African artist, and the first to cinch the MTV Video Music Awards’ Afrobeats honor (one they may have had to make because your hit was so massive)? If you’re Rema , you go home.
The 24-year-old took the world by storm in 2022 with his lover-boy anthem “Calm Down” and its remix with Selena Gomez, and has since stayed consistent with more quality music like “Charm,” “DND,” and a feature on Victony’s popular “Soweto” remix alongside Don Toliver and Tempoe. However, Rema tells Rolling Stone his sound is evolving and his latest single, “Benin Boys,” is a taste of it: a bold and brash declaration that no matter where life takes him, it’s his hometown in Southern Nigeria that got him there. Rema was raised in Benin City and didn’t leave until 2018, when he moved to Lagos to work on his first and self-titled EP with one of the country’s premiere local labels, Mavin Records.
When he headlined a sold-out show at London’s storied O2 Arena last November and evoked Benin traditions cloaked in rock-star drama, some fans from the show and on the web accused the imagery of being demonic. “Beware of the music you listen as a Christian” one clip of the concert on YouTube is titled. “It was sad.
It was quite heartbreaking,” Rema says about the backlash. He had made his first entrance on a massive p.
