Top Nigerian Music Trends To Watch in 2026

At the start of 2025, the biggest prediction was that the potpourri of sounds heralded by Rema’s seminal sophomore album, Heis, which interpreted American Trap music through a distinctively Nigerian lens, would flourish and take on a more refined shape in the new year. This prediction turned out to be eerily accurate but it would materialize in a way only a few people imagined. 

In April that year, Rema released his second R&B single of the year Bout You, a heady saccharine-sweet number in which he serenades his muse with lyrics dripping with palpable yearning; a fitting sequel to February’s Is It a Crime, which samples Sade Adu’s 1985 track of the same title. Both singles lit up the internet with rave reviews about Rema’s seemingly limitless versatility. But they also prompted worry that his experimentations with Trap music had come to an end, which could spell the end of a sound that had only begun to take on shape.

Around that time, Cruel Santino, one of the most visible figures within Nigeria’s Alté movement, hosted a stream titled Underground All Stars, whose grunge black and red poster advertised a lineup that included Zaylevelten and Luwa.mp4, both of whom, would in the months ahead,  herald some of the most forward-thinking and propulsive Nigerian reimaginings of the Hip Hop genre. 

Broadly speaking, 2025 was the year Nigerian underground music gained significant purchase in mainstream culture. No artist embodied this shift better than Mavo, who was also on Cruel Santino’s Underground All Stars scene. Last year, he took pop culture by storm, delivering a repertoire of hits that would make most mainstream acts misty-eyed. As the renaissance of underground music marches ahead in 2026, here are a few music trends to look out for this year.

1. Underground Music Will Shape Culture To a Greater Extent This Year

In all honesty, this is less a prediction than it is an admission of the facts. We’re merely days into the year, and new underground artists are spawning at a velocity that is starting to be difficult to keep up with. Last week brought two major revelations. The first being Nepopiano, a cheeky neologism coined to describe a variety of Amapiano being heralded by a cadre of rich kids who are not shy about leaning into their privileged status. How Far by No11, Ayjay Bobo, and Monochrome, released last weekend, has been marketed with this tag and the song is quickly taking over TikTok. A quick search will surface jaunty clips in which No11, Ayjay Bobo, and Monochrome flaunt luxurious cars with the song playing in the background. Davido and Zlatan were recently spotted in a club with No11, vibing to the record. Away from Nepopiano, a new upstart named Igwe Aka has been garnering public attention, including co-signs from Fireboy, Tay Iwar, Jeriq, Blaqbonez, Taves, and Odeal, since he released a snippet in which he delivers crisp rap verses in English and Igbo over a viscerally entrancing Trap beat. 2026 may just be starting but it’s already clear that the underground scene will shape culture in bigger ways this year. 

2. 2026 Will See a Renaissance in Nigerian Hip Hop 

The climax of the Nigerian mainstream Hip Hop scene last year was the rap beef between Odumodublvck and Blaqbobez, former friends who in a surprising turn of events clashed bitterly last year. Among the denouements of the beef are projects by the duo, as well as scathing diss tracks. The spectacle of this beef notwithstanding, much of the excitement in Nigerian Hip Hop last year came from fast-rising underground rapper Zaylevelten, whose innovative reinterpretation of Opium music through a decidedly Nigerian lens took the country by storm. The success of his mixtape Then It Got Crazy has suffused the Nigerian music scene with a kind of excitement that has eluded it in the past few years. And with artists like Luwa.mp4, S1orDie, Wave$tar, and Igwe Aka in tow, 2026 already looks exciting for Nigerian Hip Hop. 

3. Asake Will Have a Blistering Run of Form This Year

As music analysts have, in the past few weeks, reflected on 2025 with the hope of gleaning insights that may prove instructive this year, Asake’s 2025 run has been widely celebrated as exemplary. Despite putting out only two singles the whole of last year, his grip on culture was undeniable. In a sense, 2025 functioned as a placeholder year for the 31-year-old; a period to steady his ship after a flurry of major changes—most notably parting ways with YBNL and weathering a blitz of negative publicity that trailed him early on in the year. Now with the tumult of last year largely behind him, he looks ever more poised to return to his usual prolific form. Fans currently expect two projects from him: a collaborative tape with Wizkid titled Real and a solo album titled M$NEY. If Asake has left us with any charge in 2025, it’s that pinning down his exact course of action will likely leave you in a tailspin. Nonetheless, all the signs seem to point to a prolific year for him.

4. Music Fans Can Expect R&B To Have A Bigger Year

In 2022, Ezra Klein’s book Why We’re Polarized shot to the centre of public conversation largely because of how poignantly it spoke to our increasingly fractured political landscape. Its central observation, which is that opposing political ideas or mores tend to mirror each other’s drift toward extremity, can be extrapolated to cultural conversations. Much has been said about how in 2025, the Nigerian music scene witnessed the rise of freewheeling unorthodox sounds—case in point: the laissez-faire panoply of sounds heralded by Mavo. But on the other end of the spectrum was an efflorescence of R&B, this fact has mostly gone unacknowledged by many music critics. Fola, who was arguably the artist of last year, released a commercially acclaimed R&B-inspired album. Likewise, R&B acts like Odeal, Gabzy, and Nonso Amadi put out some of the best music last year. R&B-adjacent acts like Taves and Tariq were also brilliant. This year, as the frenetic sounds of Nigeria’s underground scene gain more purchase, we can only expect a commensurate level of fervor from music lovers with a softer palette.