Asake: Work of Art review | Alexis Petridis’s album of the week

‘Oluwa gbe from the slum to the top,” sings Asake on Awodi, the second track from his second album. It’s a typical Asake lyric, in that it suddenly switches from Yoruba to English in the middle of a sentence, a linguistic tic you could view as a bullish refusal on the part of the 28-year-old Nigerian to water down his music for western audiences. It’s also a line that acts as a neat summation of Asake’s career.

He has talked about coming from, if not a slum exactly, then “a neighbourhood that is considered dangerous, a neighbourhood where everybody wakes up to hustle for their daily meals”. He released his debut single, Ayeeza, five years ago, but things really took off internationally with Work of Art’s predecessor, Mr Money With the Vibe, in 2022. His ascent was doubtless helped by a co-sign from fellow Afrobeats artist Burna Boy, who appeared on a remix of his track Sungba. But by the end of the year, when Asake appeared on a single by self-styled Queen of Afrobeats Tiwa Savage called Loaded, it wasn’t entirely clear who was doing who a favour.

It’s a shift reflected in the very appearance of Work of Art: while Mr Money With the Vibe arrived with a cover photo that looked not unlike a police mugshot – albeit a police mugshot in which Asake was smiling broadly, the better to reveal his grills – Work of Art bears a photo of the singer with the same slightly goofy grin, but clad in a pinstripe suit, surrounded by paintings, one of them apparently a self-portrait somewhat in the style of Picasso.

It fetches up less than a year after his debut. A man who appeared on nine singles over the course of 2022, Asake is nothing if not productive, clearly a believer in the theory that you need a constant torrent of new material to maintain your position in an overcrowded market and a world of short attention spans. Perhaps the speed and urgency with which he makes music accounts for the fact that Work of Art doesn’t shift dramatically away from the blueprint laid out on Mr Money With the Vibe: “log drum” bass and soft, deep house-y synths derived from South African amapiano; choral backing vocals that recall a softer variant of the call-and-response approach of Yoruba fuji, the latter genre’s influence particularly pronounced on the closing Yoga; lyrics in which hip-hop slang (“shawty”, “jiggy”, “cheddar”, “beefing”, “bitches on my right side”) leaps out from the lines in Asake’s native tongue, and Nigerian brand names (not least that of the synthetic cannabinoid Colorado) mingle with Louis Vuitton and Gucci; no lead vocal allowed out before first being lightly dressed with Auto-Tune.

Or perhaps Asake is disinclined to fix something that isn’t broken, and not merely on account of his last album’s success: the constituent elements still amount to a beguilingly lovely sound, summery and appealing.

Certainly, it doesn’t sound like an album that has been hastily thrown together. The production is beautifully done: the moment on 2:30 when the bassline slips into a stammering pattern that underlines the rhythm of Asake’s vocal, and the delicate snare rolls that punctuate the beat of Sunshine, are small things but they suggest a pleasingly keen attention to detail. It’s also more texturally rich than a rush-job would be, the palette of supporting sounds broad enough to encompass everything from a country-ish fiddle weaving through Mogbe to dancehall-influenced interjections to the rather Dire Straits-evoking guitar that opens Sunshine.

“I wonder, I wonder, American wonder,” he keeps repeating on Awodi, not the only sign on Work of Art that, Yoruba lyrics or not, Asake is taken with western pop success. There may be a song here called Lonely at the Top, but the lyrics suggest a man unbothered by fame’s alienating effect and eager for greater celebrity.

Sunshine, meanwhile, steals its hook from the Lighthouse Family’s 1995 smash Ocean Drive. You could view that as glomming on to British and American pop’s trend for the instant sugar-rush brought on by borrowing from immediately recognisable 90s and 00s hits, but in truth, Asake’s songwriting doesn’t need added novelty value. Every song on Work of Art is melodically really strong and so effortlessly commercial-sounding that it’s hard to pick out future singles, although the building chorus of I Believe is a striking earworm.

Like all second albums that offer only minor adjustments to a debut, Work of Art leaves you wondering a little about what the future holds. But such thoughts are easy to dispel during the half-hour it plays for: you’re too busy enjoying yourself to worry, which suggests Asake’s rise is unstoppable.

This week Alexis listened to

Todd Russell and the Dangerous Coats – 1900 Ocean Avenue
Dug out from the archive of sometime DFA alumnus Scotty Coats, a marvellous analogue synth-driven slice of what the late Andrew Weatherall would have called “drug chug”, slow-motion and sun-dappled.