When Nigerian singer Rema emerged with one of the best Afrobeats songs of the late 2010s, “ Dumebi ,” he was a teenager and he sounded like it. He looked like it in the video, too, a sunny hang with other fashionable teens in the kind of bright casuals you could snag from Forever 21. His nasal trills exuded youthful innocence, even though he was coming on to some young woman by calling his dick a banana in Yoruba.

His voice had barely dropped when the original version of “ Calm Down ” was released about three years later. It then became an international hit when Selena Gomez rode the wave of its catchy hook, soft spokenness, and slick amorism on an official remix . It led to Rema winning the MTV Video Music Awards’ inaugural Moon Person [f.

k.a. Moon Man] for Afrobeats and becoming the first African artist to lead a track that earned over one billion streams on Spotify.

“Calm Down” was a single on his debut album, Rave & Roses , marked by sweet, seductive Afrobeats tinged with jazz and dancehall, an aesthetic of colorful cartoons, and a teddy bear mascot. There was always a slight edge to the saccharine as Rema rose through the ranks of Afrobeats with a few EPs and that album, but it was globally palatable and much like what was popular at the time – SoundCloud rap, poppy Afrobeats, and alternative R&B. His latest album, Heis , is nothing like that.

Fittingly, it takes after not only his longtime social media handle – heisrema – but the Greek word for “nu.