What Wizkid’s Intense Feature Run Reveals About His Career Trajectory 

When the average person thinks of December, what often comes to mind is the Yuletide festivities: copious amounts of food flowing on Christmas day; gifts and warm celebratory messages from friends and family; toting shopping bags through the market, the tedium of the action, and the deferred excitement to be gleaned from the purchased items performing an awkward tango in one’s mind. The sight at Ajose Adeogun Street, in Victoria Island, which Zenith Bank dutifully festoons with glistening decorations every Christmas, has also come to be a totem of the season, at least for those of us who live in Lagos State. For music lovers however, this period takes on the weight of reflection. Social media teems with end-of-year lists from platforms like Turntable and Billboard. Similarly, streaming platforms like Apple Music and Spotify have also, in addition to their own retrospective lists, dispatched annual music recaps to fans, who in turn have regaled themselves by brandishing these reports to their social media followings.

In the same spirit of reflection, several topics have started to brew among music enthusiasts. Chief among them is the familiar question of who the artist of the year is. Several artists are already in the running. There are upstarts like Fola and Mavo but also the usual established names: Wizkid, Burnaboy, Davido, Asake, and Ayra Starr. Wizkid however, according to public opinion, seems to have pulled ahead of the rest. The end-of-year lists by Apple Music and Spotify, both of which name him as the most-streamed artist on the Nigerian end of their operations, has lent credibility to this opinion. What’s perhaps most unusual about Wizkid seemingly leading the artist of the year race is that unlike Burna Boy, Olamide and Davido, the 35-year-old singer did not release an album this year. More fascinating is the fact that he went through the year without dropping a single. Without an album or a single, how then did he assert himself on culture with such dominance? He pulled off a feature run that can only be described as awe-inspiring. Sixteen features with an eclectic lineup including Ayra Starr, Tyla, Odeal, Mavo, Young Jonn, Olamide, Odumodublvck, and others. 

Over his career, Wizkid has been known to occasionally observe moments of pause from his typical release cycle, turning instead to an extended run of features for creative expression. We first glimpsed this in the intervening years between 2011’s Superstar and 2014’s Ayo. In that period, Wizkid largely pulled back from releasing material of his own, instead coasting on a flotilla of dazzling features. Kcee’s Pull Over, Lynx’s Fine Lady, Iyanya’s Sexy Mama, and R2bees’ Slow Down are among the gems that emerged from this period. In the years leading up to 2020’s Made in Lagos he once against reprised this feat, embarking on a feature run that spawned songs like his 2017 collaboration with MUT4Y Manya, Kana with Olamide, Fake Love with Duncan Mighty Soco with Starboy Terri, Soft and Ceexa Milli, Skepta’s Bad Energy, Larry Gaga’s Low and Spinall’s Dis Love, which also featured Tiwa Savage. 

Nonetheless, a sixteen-feature-a-year run is unprecedented for Wizkid. And while quantity very often has an inverse relationship with quality, Wizkid pulls off the herculean task of staying fresh and inspired in most of the songs. In fact, some of the verses find him at his best in years. Consider Getting Paid, the standout track on Sarz’s debut album Protect Sarz At All Costs. Over a sultry guitar sample accompanied by defiant drums, Wizkid delivers a verse bristling with a level of pomp and vivacity that I had, as a result of the wan atmosphere of his last few projects, assumed to be out of his grasp. There’s also Big Time from  Odumodublvck’s album Industry Machine in which Wizkid delivers an earnest meditation on grief and the undertow of celebrity. In an uncharacteristically long verse, one which could easily be a song in itself, Wizkid takes us on a journey down memory lane, starting from his days in Surulere, before the fame and glamour, broaching his mother’s passing in 2023, before addressing the sense of ennui that seems to hover around him these days. 

It’s for this phenomenal feature run that Wizkid is being celebrated by many as the artist of the year. And yet, one can’t help feeling a twinge of unease when considering the turbulent situation out of which this blistering feature run arose. In the weeks before Ayra Starr’s Gimme Dat, his first Nigerian feature this year, was released, Wizkid cancelled his world tour and abruptly and surprisingly paused promotion efforts towards his sixth studio album Morayo, which he released in November of 2024. In that period, he became fodder for social media banter and the subject of concern for many music critics, myself included. In an article for Culture Custodian, published in May, I interrogated his beleaguered situation. “In the past few months, however, his air of invincibility has dissipated. The album’s momentum has steeply tapered and the artist has looked increasingly adrift,” I observe. 

Wizkid has, without doubt, managed to turn the tide in the months that followed. As we prepare to turn the final page of this year, Wizkid will go down as one of the most influential artists this year. And yet this victory appears to be more of a reprieve than a permanent situation. One of the biggest criticisms against Wizkid is that since his windfall with his 2020 album Made in Lagos, he has shown little enthusiasm for sonic evolution. This becomes more worrisome when one considers that before Made in Lagos Wizkid had been given to taking huge swings with his sound, through audacious singles like Come Closer and Fever—both of which seemed to have been beamed in from a different universe at the time of their release—as well as iconoclastic projects like Ayo, Sounds From The Other Side, and Soundman Vol.1. As the celebratory chants begin to abate next year, the question would once again be “Is Wizkid finally ready to step away from his comfort zone and return to innovating with his sound?” How this story ends will be decided by his readiness to tackle this question.