Boy Spyce is singing about Jonah in 2026, which means he is thinking about faith when most of his contemporaries are thinking about features and streaming numbers. The song, which came out recently with Wizard Chan and Kabaka Pyramid, is reggae-infused and deliberately slow. It is not the kind of record that gets you a viral moment on TikTok. It is the kind of record that suggests an artist who knows what he is protecting.
He came up through the Nigerian music ecosystem the way many do, grinding through open mics and Instagram clips, but something about Spyce's trajectory has been different from the start. While other young singers his age were chasing the Afrobeats formula that worked for everyone from Wizkid to Burna Boy, Spyce was already showing a willingness to sit with slower tempos, to let songs breathe. His earlier work carried a maturity that felt less like imitation and more like something genuinely his own. He was not trying to be the loudest voice in the room. He was trying to be heard.
What makes Spyce worth paying attention to right now is precisely this refusal to chase the obvious lane. Lagos has a hundred singers who can deliver the club-ready production that labels want. Spyce is one of the few who seems interested in why he is singing in the first place. The Jonah collaboration with Wizard Chan and Kabaka Pyramid is a perfect example. Bringing in Kabaka Pyramid, a Jamaican reggae artist, suggests conversations happening behind the scenes about genre and meaning. The song is about faith, about being swallowed by circumstances and emerging changed. It is a record that a certain kind of listener will keep coming back to, not because it is flashy but because it works on you slowly.
There is something almost counterintuitive about the way Spyce is building his catalog in 2025 and 2026. He is not flooding the timeline with singles every month. He is not chasing features with every major artist on the continent. Instead, he seems to be making deliberate choices about who he works with and what those collaborations say about his artistic identity. This is not the strategy that makes you blow up overnight. It is the strategy that makes you last. It is the strategy that allows people to actually know who you are, rather than just knowing your hook.
The Nigerian music industry right now is flooded with singers. What distinguishes Spyce is restraint. He understands something that a lot of younger artists have not quite learned yet, which is that scarcity creates value. When he releases something, it matters because you do not hear from him constantly. His voice, which sits in that middle register that somehow feels both warm and searching, has a quality that works better when you are paying attention rather than half-listening. You cannot half-listen to Jonah. You have to commit to it.
What comes next for him is harder to predict than with most artists his age, precisely because he is not following the obvious playbook. He could easily sign to one of the major labels and suddenly have the production budget and playlist placements that turn songs into hits. But his choices so far suggest he might be building something more particular, more intentional. The kind of thing that takes longer to grow but means something different when it does. In a music landscape that rewards speed and noise, Boy Spyce is making a case for depth and time. That might end up being the rarest thing he offers.
OduDiscover is OduNews’s spotlight on Nigeria’s next generation of talent.
