When Lojay walked into the 67th Grammy Awards in February 2025, he was a nominated artist with no debut album. That detail mattered because it captured something specific about where his career stood: the work had already been recognized at the highest level, and yet the formal statement of who he was as a complete artist had not yet arrived. XOXO, the debut album he has spent years building toward, arrives on July 2, 2026. The wait has made it one of the most anticipated projects in contemporary Afrobeats, and the body of singles he has released to prepare the ground for it makes clear why.
Five Years in the Making
Lekan Osifeso Jr. started making music professionally in 2016 while still completing his degree. By the time he graduated, Afrobeats was beginning its most significant period of global expansion, and Lojay was positioned to be part of it, not as a passenger but as someone with a clear musical identity and the technical ability to match it. He signed with Koratori Recordings and began building the discography that would eventually lead here.
His voice is what people tend to notice first. It is melodic and fluid, capable of moving between registers in the middle of a phrase without losing its emotional through line. He has described his approach to genre as deliberately unconstrained, refusing to commit to a single box when the music he hears in his head moves across multiple of them. Afrobeats, R&B, amapiano: he treats them as resources rather than destinations.
Sensational
The Grammy nomination changed the scale. "Sensational," the 2023 collaboration with Chris Brown and Davido, accumulated over 94 million Spotify plays and earned a spot on the 2025 Grammy nominations list in the Best African Music Performance category. For an artist who had not yet released a debut album, this was an unusual kind of recognition: the world was acknowledging his gifts before he had given it the complete picture of who he was.
That pressure might have caused someone else to rush. Lojay appears to have done the opposite. He spent 2024 and 2025 releasing singles that tested different facets of what XOXO would eventually be, building the album in public without giving the full structure away. Each single was a promise. The album is where the promises become a single coherent thing.
The Singles
"Somebody Like You," produced by Sarz, arrived as a ballad with the specific emotional weight of someone who has been both the person who leaves and the person who stays. Sarz is one of the most important producers in the history of Nigerian popular music, and his understanding of how to build a beat around vulnerability rather than against it made him the right collaborator for the song Lojay was writing.
"Mwah," the collaboration with UK R&B talent Odeal, showed a different register entirely: sweeter, more playful, the kind of song that performs its affection openly. Then came "Body," the collaboration with Colombian singer Feid, which fused Afrobeats rhythms with reggaeton energy in a way that felt inevitable rather than experimental. The meeting of two artists who understand how to make dancing feel like communication produced exactly the track it was supposed to. "Tenner," produced by Black Culture, leaned into the 3 step tradition and added another dimension to the project's sonic range.
XOXO
The 14 track debut pulls from everyone who has shaped Lojay's creative range. Tyla appears on "Memories." Victony joins for "Sawa." The project explores the specific emotional territory of intimacy: its complications, its losses, its small recoveries. The title, XOXO, is not ironic. It means what it says. This is a record about love in all the forms it takes when you are paying close attention.
The North American headline tour that accompanies the album's release represents the next phase of an international expansion that has been happening quietly for years. Lojay has been building an audience across borders through the process that has always worked: writing songs that carry their meaning clearly regardless of where you grew up or what you know about Nigerian music history.
The Genre Question
Lojay's stated refusal to commit to a genre is not a marketing position. It reflects a genuine musical intelligence. The artists who have made the most durable contributions to contemporary pop are the ones who understand that genre is a grammar, not a destination. You use it to communicate, and then you put it down when the message changes.
At 30, Lojay is releasing his debut album at an unusual point in his career: already Grammy nominated, already globally recognized, already covered by publications that do not typically write about first albums. The pressure this creates is real. So is the quality of the music he has built to meet it. The two things are in conversation with each other, and XOXO is where that conversation arrives at a conclusion.
Ready
XOXO arrives July 2, 2026 via Koratori. It is the formal introduction of an artist the world already knows, which is a strange and specific situation. The debut album usually does the work of saying: this is who I am. Lojay's debut album will do something different. It will say: this is the full picture of something you already suspected. That is a harder thing to do. Based on everything he has released in the years leading up to it, he clearly has the ability to do it.
