From The Curator at BlackFM
There is a particular pleasure to be had in watching an artist time a release with the precision of a vintner choosing the exact week to bottle a vintage, and BNXN, never a man short of self-assurance, has rather deftly done just that. His new EP, Still In Charge, arrived to coincide with Nigeria’s Independence Day, a scheduling decision that, as the outlet notjustok.com rightly observed, is “hard not to read as a flex.” Whether or not BNXN himself has confirmed the symbolism matters little; in the theatre of modern Afrobeats, a well-placed silence can say as much as a press release. The result is a six-track project, brisk and unfussy, running to roughly sixteen minutes, and distributed through EMPIRE, the independent label that has become something of a quiet power broker in the genre’s global expansion.
A Compact Statement with Notable Company
Brevity, of course, is its own kind of confidence. Where some artists mistake length for ambition, BNXN has opted for economy, trusting that six tracks, tightly sequenced, can say more than sixteen loosely assembled ones. The EP enlists two guests who, on paper, represent rather different temperaments within the current Afrobeats landscape: Asake, whose fervent, percussive delivery has made him one of the genre’s most electrifying live presences, and FOLA, whose contribution brings, in the words of the source material, “a different kind of vibe” entirely. The project opens with Eja Meja, the Asake collaboration, before FOLA’s appearance on Shamaya offers something of a tonal counterweight. It is a neat piece of sequencing, the kind that suggests a producer’s ear rather than an algorithm’s logic.
The EP’s second track, Online, stands as BNXN’s own solo statement, and listeners may already be familiar with it: it was released beforehand as the project’s final promotional single. Lyrically, it continues a theme that has threaded through much of BNXN’s recent output, that of moving with quiet confidence, both at home and abroad, a kind of understated cosmopolitanism that feels true to the artist’s own trajectory from Lagos sessions to international stages.
Still In Charge and the Logic of a Busy Year
Context matters here, as it so often does with an artist’s discography. Still In Charge does not arrive in isolation but as the latest chapter in an idea BNXN first articulated on his 2025 sophomore album, CAPTAIN, a record built, as the EP’s title now reiterates, around the notion of growth through greater command of one’s own sound and direction. It follows not only that album but also his collaborative project with the producer Sarz, The Game Needs Us, meaning this new EP is in fact the third substantial body of work BNXN has put before the public in what has evidently been a busy year. There is something almost old-fashioned about this kind of productivity, a reminder that before the age of the algorithmically timed single drip, artists simply made records, one after another, and let the audience catch up.
Charting Success and a Growing Reputation
Upon its release, Still In Charge debuted on Apple Music’s Nigeria albums chart in its latest snapshot, a modest but telling indicator of the appetite that remains for BNXN’s particular vocal register, one that manages to sound simultaneously vulnerable and assured, a difficult balance that fewer singers achieve than one might imagine. The achievement reinforces what followers of Afrobeats have long suspected, namely that BNXN occupies a distinctive niche among the genre’s vocalists, less reliant on bombast than many of his contemporaries, more inclined towards melodic nuance and lyrical intimacy.
Afrobeats, for all its global ascendance over the past decade, has always rewarded precisely this kind of versatility, artists capable of moving between the euphoric and the introspective without losing their footing. BNXN, in releasing steadily across formats throughout the year, from full-length statements to collaborative ventures to now this tightly wound EP, has positioned himself as something of a connoisseur’s favourite within a genre increasingly dominated by viral singles and fleeting trends. It is worth noting, too, that his choice of collaborators, Asake and FOLA chief among them on this project, and Sarz on the preceding one, speaks to a deliberate curatorial instinct rather than mere commercial calculation.
A Fitting Close to the Year
As 2026 draws towards its close, BNXN’s Still In Charge stands as a fitting, if modest, capstone to a year defined by consistency rather than spectacle. It is not, perhaps, the grandest statement an artist might make, but there is a quiet dignity in an artist simply continuing to work, to release, to refine, while the independence celebrations unfold around him, lending the whole exercise an air of symbolic self-determination that feels entirely intentional, however much BNXN himself might decline to say so outright.
Source: notjustok.com. Keep listening on BlackFM Afrobeats radio.
