Music
2025
Uwade
Traditional highlife and the treaties of Cicero sound completely contemporary in the hands of the Nigerian-American indie promise.
Uwade was born in Nigeria, moved to North Carolina at a young age, and grew up with church singing and Fela Kuti. Now that the singer-songwriter is charting her own path, those influences blend with the subject of her degree: the classical literature of Cicero and Virgil. Debut album Florilegium occupies a colorful middle ground between deeply rooted, rhythmic highlife sounds and an unmistakably American kind of melancholy. That Uwade once recorded a cover of The Strokes' 'Under Control' with Fleet Foxes feels nothing less than completely logical. That one of her most streamed songs is an ode to the late highlife icon Victor Uwaifo is no less so. Her sound is intimate, her voice soft and heavenly like Clairo's, but she can go in any direction with it.
