Tems makes music on her own terms, which is the only way she has ever made it. Love Is a Kingdom, released without announcement on November 21, 2025 through RCA Records and her own Since93 imprint, is a seven track EP recorded in the same London studio where her debut album Born in the Wild took shape. Temilade Openiyi is thirty years old, a Grammy Award winner, and one of the most widely heard Nigerian artists of her generation. Love Is a Kingdom does not try to consolidate that position or expand it into new territory. It makes the case, quietly and with complete assurance, that the position is solid enough to support anything she wants to do next, and that the work itself is more important than what surrounds it. A project this honest and this deliberate belongs to no particular moment and cannot be reduced to one. It simply belongs to her.
Seven Songs About Love
The EP moves through love with the patience of someone who has stopped trying to explain it and started simply tracing its different faces across seven carefully constructed tracks. First opens the record with a kind of devotion that is clear and unguarded, setting a tone that the rest of the EP builds on without repeating. I'm Not Sure lets romantic uncertainty spill out in tender waves that feel more honest than resolution would. Big Daddy, released with an official visualizer directed by Jyde Ajala, is the EP's most assertive statement: confident, physical, and built around a groove that stakes its territory without apology. What You Need showcases the strongest vocal performance on the collection, Tems over melancholic production that gives her room to demonstrate what she is technically capable of. Mine brings an explosive energy to the second half of the record before the title track closes with something that sounds like an act of faith: two songs joined together into something larger than either.
The Producer Who Wrote Her Own EP
Love Is a Kingdom is primarily a Tems production. She wrote, composed and produced the majority of the project herself, bringing in trusted collaborators GuiltyBeatz, AOD and LONDON for specific contributions rather than as primary architects of the sound. This is consistent with the direction she has been moving since For Broken Ears, her debut EP from 2020 that established her as a songwriter and producer of real substance before the commercial attention arrived. The EP's sound carries the marks of someone who knows exactly which frequencies she wants and how to get them. The bass sits where she places it. The vocal arrangements reflect choices made by the vocalist herself, not adjustments made in service of a producer's vision. Nothing on Love Is a Kingdom happened without her specific intention.
What the Surprise Release Said
Releasing an EP without prior announcement is itself a statement. Love Is a Kingdom arrived with no press campaign, no single rollout, no advance positioning of any kind. It simply appeared. For an artist of Tems's profile, working within a major label infrastructure, that kind of release requires real and sustained insistence. The surprise drop communicated something clear: this was not a commercial project in the conventional sense. It was music released because it was ready, not because a schedule required it. The response was immediate. Streaming numbers confirmed what critics noted within hours of the release: this was a project people wanted to hear, not because it had been marketed into their attention but because the music itself had enough pull to find its own audience and hold it. The lack of a campaign made the quality of the project more visible, not less.
The Lagos to London Axis
Lagos Love, the fifth track on the EP, holds the record's geographic and emotional center. Born in Lagos and now splitting time between Nigeria and the UK, Tems occupies a position in global music that is neither fully local nor fully international in the conventional sense. Her sound draws on Afrobeats structure and Yoruba vocal tradition while operating confidently within the R&B and alternative soul spaces that gave her early international visibility through collaborations with Wizkid and Drake. Love Is a Kingdom does not navigate that complexity. It inhabits it naturally, as if the question of genre and geography had been settled long ago. The EP sounds like it was made by someone who stopped thinking about where the music belongs and focused entirely on what it needs to be.
The title track at the end of the record brings both worlds together most completely. Kingdom is a concept that carries different weights in different cultural contexts. Here it functions as a private geography, a space defined by emotional truth rather than borders. The production on that final track is the most layered on the EP, and the decision to end there rather than with something more stripped back signals confidence. The EP closes at full height.
After the Grammys
Tems won her first Grammy Award as a featured artist and her second, in the Best African Music Performance category at the 2025 ceremony, for her own composition Love Me JeJe. Love Is a Kingdom is the work that follows those recognitions without being defined by them. The EP does not reach for the kind of statement a Grammy winning artist is expected to make in order to justify the attention. It is quieter than that, and more certain. It sounds like someone who has been through the cycle of global recognition and found that the work itself is what matters and what sustains. Love Is a Kingdom is seven tracks of music made by an artist who knows who she is, and who is no longer waiting for anyone's permission to say it. That clarity is the whole argument.
The release also raises a question about what comes next. An EP this focused and this complete suggests an artist who knows exactly where she is standing. The full album that follows Love Is a Kingdom will be one of the more anticipated records of the next few years, not because of expectation but because of trust. When an artist demonstrates this level of control over their own creative process, the next statement becomes something worth waiting for.
