Llona’s Internal Ordeals Are Unresolved “On The Road”

In the final moments of What Do I Do?, the outro track on Llona’s sophomore album, On The Road, he poses a question that’s equal parts denouement and new beginning: “What do I do from here?” When you rocket from relative obscurity to B-list fame, touring Nigeria—not a faux American-world-tour-excluding-Africa-and-Asia copy either—with the most varied stops since the last vestiges of the early 2010s corporations-backed uni shows. When your music has cultivated a fanbase of diehard believers attached to your aesthetic, philosophy, and message; and when you’ve gone from literal homelessness to relative comfort as a bona fide star, what do you do next? He spends the entirety of On The Road grappling with this question in its complexity. He finds answers, no doubt, but ultimately leaves us with more questions about his psyche. 

Among many other rarities in the contemporary Nigerian music scene, including the album four-peat—the trifecta has been perfected—or periods without distinguishable Big 3 artists, is the ‘nationwide tour.’ Even rarer is the concept of a full-length album being recorded while on this unicorn tour. The Kogi-born, Kano-bred melancholic singer achieved both. Following the release of his critically acclaimed debut album, Homeless, in July 2024, Llona commenced a tour of the same name spanning 23 cities. This writer recalls speaking to an attendee at the Ibadan stop, a fan who—moved by the ecstatic reactions of others—described the concert as a family affair. Llona’s sombre mid-tempo Afropop centered on young, urban working-class struggles. Heavy interiority with occasional glances into his life, as on the semi-autobiographical records Another Day and Comforter. 

Essentially, a version of the emo-influenced Nigerian pop boy that culture journalist Emmanuel Esomnofu analysed in his 2022 essay tracing the archetype’s emergence. Ahead of the album, all fans had to work with was the July 2025 single Dead Flowers, essentially a way for him and his team to appreciate the journey so far. A guest verse on T.I Blaze’s Lonely Road also hinted at what we now hear on this project. Then came the album announcement. And then the official tracklist with Dead Flowers left out. His claim that the project would continue the Homeless story stood at odds with the likelihood that it was merely a set of promises for promotional purposes. And even at that, a conceptual extension is no guarantee of artistic or personal growth. 

Llona recedes further inward on this album. In relation to the overarching ‘on the road’ theme, a dense first verse on Anger Management ushers you into his frantic state of mind (“The trauma lives in my body that owes a rent/Tryna talk to my people but they don’t get). It’s a contrast in a record: summery Spanish guitar-laced ‘80s pop production for a piercing internal monologue about battles with anger and strife. Excerpts from a therapy session serve as a bridge for the rest of the song until he eventually requests to be woken up to a different reality (Hi, Yxng Dxnzl, Hi Mr. Morale, Hi Ycee). Morrelo lends his falsetto to Different Pictures where Llona reflects on sacrificing time with family and friends for his career. Morrelo sings “How many times till you realise?” that this sacrifice is itself a lot. Llona tries to reassure himself—perhaps us also, perhaps both—that nothing has changed. This dichotomy is subtle yet telling of where the answer really lies—Morrelo is right. Drenched in melodies, you can almost discount the zither wailing in the background to be a distraction. 

Pressure is as you’d assume. Confessional in a way that makes you want to insert singers as part and parcel of the “Confessional Generation,” writer Kanyinsola Olorunnisola typified in his striking Nigerian literature death rejoinder. Built around looped chords oddly similar to Adekunle Gold’s AG Baby, this song has Llona baring, and baring some more. Fans get their fair share (“And the fans dey wait, expectations e plenty for me”). Confidantes get theirs (“My life on the line but I no fit tell somebody”). He gets his, resigning to more work as an escape (“Cannot be unlucky every day, I do it nonstop”). The pressures from Homeless never really dissipated. If anything, they multiplied as he became more. Watching clips from the tour, you wouldn’t know that Llona was worried about his safety. But he sings it so. Salami TK’s sparse instrumentation ensures that on the penultimate track, Won’t Die, he can further respond to comments about his music curing depression by presenting scenarios in which the fans might stop loving him. One might catch oneself laughing at the thought of the melancholist-in-chief being abandoned because he’s ‘not on steeze’. However, going by Won’t Die, it’s a worry he’s apparently entertained. 

Wizkid and Asake’s Turbulence isn’t all the flight disturbance needed this year. Llona has another for you. This one has a flute dancing in the wind. It has Llona flexing 2Baba-adjacent vocals as he declares a new beginning, soldier man who is brother to a real-life soldier, swaggering with the most ferocious electric guitar solo since Lady Donli’s The Bad Ones for an accomplice. Ali Bomaye on Gangster Lover turned nightmare-to-testy-wannabes on Turbulence. It’s successful where Masculine Love isn’t. That might also be due to the fact that, in attempting to deconstruct radfems’ ‘inhuman’ image of men on a song, he commits a gaffe by proposing ‘imperfect love.’ It’s brave that Llona chose to address this subject on an album rife with interrogating masculinity, even though a 2-minute track won’t answer such deep sociopolitical quandaries. Knowing that Tems was potentially set to be featured on the record gives food for thought about what might have been.

Masculinity is better broached on the stoic anthem, N****s Don’t Get Love. Llona croons that “there’s a thousand ways to blame us/n**gas don’t get favours,” a sentiment bound to resonate with many men, which should also be interrogated further beyond reflex misogynoir as the world rages on about a ‘Male Loneliness epidemic’. It’s a rather sweeping allusion that also raises the question of how other men fit in men’s lives—as friends, brothers; as bastions for mental health struggles. He lampoons the imprisonment of fame convincingly, a topic more and more Nigerian artists seem interested in (Look no further for evidence of the Nigerian popstar in the surveillance age). GR8 gets the best value of his three production credits on the tape. 

All this notwithstanding, this writer would have appreciated more time with Llona, the person, than the ideals and themes explored. There wasn’t enough interiority to match the weighty lyrics tossed around in verses and hooks. For instance, on Cry with Ghanaian rapper Black Sherif, he begins with the utterly poetic two-step “What’s the possibilities of a young warlock? That’s the burden of a young poor boy,” but by the time the song ends, you’re left wishing he spoke some more about his own experience with being burdened early, like he so effortlessly shares in interviews. Or on Look at Me (with Fridayy), you question whether this brother-for-brother messaging wouldn’t work better with references. We don’t even have to know these people. 

Rappers write entire cinematic operas listing individuals whose backstories we sometimes don’t know about until much later—think Paybac Iboro’s Ekere. They could even be fictional—think Tec of Show Dem Camp’s ẹ̀gbọ́n. The point is that, eventually, simply being confessional starts to feel like a drag when there’s little palpable connection to your person. Yes, it’s Llona’s experience on wax, and that can’t be disputed. But what happens when the songs sound detached, regardless? What then? It doesn’t help that his full vocal range is unmaximised on this LP. A singer with a natural vibrato like his shouldn’t suffer from a scarcity of high points on songs. Across On The Road’s nearly 40-minute runtime, you can point to multiple records that would be an effort to slog through at a concert, possibly better served by a pre-chorus or third verse somewhere. Not a grand issue, but an issue nonetheless. 

This ambiguity peppering records won’t be a demerit for some. From the engines revving on the intro, Monster or Not, inducing memories of similarly cinematic Choc Boiz intros, till the theremin heralds that question of what he’d do in the album’s final moments, this sect of fans will be satisfied. Llona has attempted to answer his questions and theirs. They couldn’t care less about his state of mind. But if this is a reflection of his psyche at the moment, then his internal turmoil is far from resolved. 

On The Road has more tepid moments than would have been preferred. Not emotionless, certainly not irrelevant, but at times almost collapsing in on itself. Material this heavy can’t be expected to sound uber-refined, and the album leans into that. It’s honest, exhibiting a rare thematic connection between albums that isn’t just for aesthetic sake. When you think of storytelling projects in Nigerian music, you might not necessarily think afroR&B or Afrosoul—terms more fitting for the blues in Llona’s musical embrace. And yet, here’s one that threads an ongoing narrative of the hustling artist for whom the limelight is another beginning. What he does next is beyond just him, just as Homeless was. And it appears that finding this out on the road has only made life tougher.