Dwin, The Stoic is the music-making alter-ego of Edwin Madu, the former editor-in-chief of Zikoko who moonlights as a solo artist, at least on the nights when he is not half of the Indie duo, The Ignis Brothers. A hectic bio and you would expect it to have meant a similarly hectic life for the 27-year-old shuffling these personas, at least until his resignation from the media company late last year and the increased funneling of time and effort into the music that it inevitably brought. Love Lane, the 5-track EP co-helmed and produced by Rhaffy is the first fruit of this shift in direction, and Dwin, The Stoic would regard higher than any other compliment, the note that this enhanced attention has yielded a perceptibly more refined product.
Two music careers running concurrently have now spawned 3 projects and at least ten times as many songs, but it only takes a small fraction of this discography to establish who the artist, Dwin, The Stoic is. Vocal-driven, he wants to forge his way around a song rather than have a path charted for him by production, and with a voice like his, why not? So he will reach for his falsetto for the passionate burst of vulnerability and lean into his lows for sullen reflection, allowing the crests and troughs of his voice to document the ups and downs of life and love. And with a background in writing and poetry every bit as strong as his singing talent, he can script these ballads on the human condition with a dash of exquisite realism.
These are the pillars upon which he has built a career and amassed a fanbase, and once more Dwin, The Stoic combines exploratory writing and disarming delivery to loosen heartstrings on Love Lane. Its title appears to confine him to a narrow scope, but he is able to stretch this theme, arriving from his romantic enclave to also examine topics like loss, lust, and especially heartbreak. Five songs are hardly enough to properly elucidate on any one emotion let alone one as complex and unpredictable as love, but Dwin is able to make the most of them.
The central track and the album’s biggest single, Without Your Love will rightly receive most of the spotlight. Here, Dwin, The Stoic is the smitten Romeo who is ready to commit resources for the satisfaction of a partner, contented, as many often are in the infatuation phase, with nothing in return but her presence. “Anything you need/ I’ll just get it for ya/ Baby, as for me, Girl, you’re all I need”, he oozes, as he and Rhaffy layer one hook after another before building to a simple, slick chorus. It is a love song complete with all its classical elements, but as Dwin has shown in the past, there is a lot more complexity to love, and it is not uncommon that these acts of service go unreciprocated.
Love Lane, therefore, has him unsuccessfully chasing the highs of romance, and its other tracks paint a gloomier picture of human relationships that, some would argue, is also a more realistic one. Streets begin, immediately after Rhaffy’s signature “Mordah” tag, with a man yet to fully come to terms with the end of a relationship, or at least with the realization that he is now alone in it. He is in apparent denial: “Say girl are you contemplating/ Leaving me when I’m out here waiting”, wafting into anger: “You do things I would never do to you”, before attempting to negotiate his way back: “Believe me I cannot deceive you/ It’s sweet love that I want to give you”. When this fails he sinks deeper into despair, and with a line like “I’m not well and I’ve not been sleeping”, Dwin shows that love can have lows as low as its highs are high.
Acceptance eludes him, however, and he will find some fragment of it on Home, which stars Efe Oraka in the role of the existing girlfriend. When you build a home with the person you love, a safe embrace at the end of your worst days, where do you run to when the pain is the loss of this person themselves? It is in a forlorn conundrum like this that Edwin Madu, the fiction writer, reveals himself, and Dwin and Rhaffy have between them the dexterity to saddle this track in the balance where the sadness of its material does not weigh it down sonically.
Rhaffy will take pride most of all in how he has brought on board a more involved production without distracting from Dwin, The Stoic’s alluring vocals. Dwin’s improvement in stringing melodies is also apparent, as is his willingness to borrow from a seemingly incongruous soundscape, Amapiano, into a mellow album like this.
For Don’t Wait Up, the curtain raiser, Rhaffy delivers this near-seamless integration, over which Dwin, The Stoic will emerge from the depths of heartbreak in one of the more unhealthy, yet common ways—in search of sexual pleasure with which to drown it. “I told my homes, I’ve been down for way too long/ They said… you need to find somebody”, he starts, before revealing his success in the chorus. His guest, Nigerian-American rapper Kelechief, is even more profligate, painting infidelity and threesome arcs into the scenario, but his rap verse glides over Amapiano production with such synergy that it is hard to imagine either one without the other.
The love lane does not lead to happily ever after as often as our love-crazy pop culture would have us believe, and you can trust Dwin, The Stoic, and his expository writing to furnish you with a more clear-eyed view. Animated storytelling in music, however, must not be without impassioned delivery that can accurately transcribe every emotion, and Dwin, The Stoic, and Rhaffy have wielded this expertly. Crammed in only twelve minutes are a roller-coaster of feelings, most of them already familiar, and through it all our tour guides promise both a fresh narrative and a gratifying listen, and they brilliantly deliver on both.