“Temilade, what did you add in your stew?” There’s a common theme to the online mystique surrounding Tems, the 27-year-old artist who has spent the last few years collecting industry accolades, big-hitter features and international fandoms like infinity stones. “I need Tems’ prayer,” is another popular online response when the latest news from the Lagos, Nigeria native spreads across Diasporic Twitter. And having been tapped for collaborations by a who’s-who of the world’s biggest artists – Beyoncé, Drake, Future, Wizkid, Justin Bieber, Khalid and most recently Rihanna – it’s no wonder that the masses are in awe of one of our generation’s fastest-rising stars.
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Sitting across from me in a private lounge at 180 Strand, Tems tends to agree that her path has been peppered with a certain divine providence, smiling as she testifies, “God is in charge of my life, he’s my A&R.” But having transformed opportunity into record-breaking firsts for an African artist – both in the US Billboard charts and in overall global streaming numbers – Tems is spinning her own strand of auditory gold in the current rush for the cultural zeitgeist of the continent.
Today, however, cloaked in a dark, metallic fit, Tems’ vibe is more reminiscent of onyx or something intergalactic, plucked from the future-pop ether. At first, she’s warm but watchful, wrapping her hands in her long mesh sleeves as she talks in soft, short ellipses, but the magnetism she commands across the table with her searingly direct stare and knee-high platform boots suggest her initial quiet is one of intense inner calm, not shyness.
The first time Tems and I spoke was over Zoom almost two years ago, in the autumn of 2020 for her first artist biography interview. At the time, most of us around the world had been restricted to our homes for over 10 months with the pandemic. The UK was inching back towards yet another lockdown, and the entire music industry was still confined to the virtual world. But despite all that, attention around Tems had been surging internationally in the wake of her quaking single “Try Me”. On the song, her rich velvety vocals formed an incendiary call-to-arms as she declared, “If I was the ganja, you bring the lighter / roll me in Rizla, and set me on fire.” It was an exhilaratingly heart-wrenching introduction to an original new voice.
As I pull up some of her quotes from our first encounter, we play a game of ‘Still True or Now False?’ Back then, she described her music genre as “spiritual”, a notion she hums in quiet agreement with now – it’s a label more concerned with how her music feels than how it’s categorised. I relate another story she told me, about music flowing so freely from her that she once freestyled to the beat of a dripping tap at a friend’s house. (“It’s just natural, like it’s coming from my soul.”) At this memory she smiles, and hands me her new iPhone, where she’s already racked up over 2,800 voice memos capturing the melodies of that same spiritual outpour: “If I don’t voice it, it disappears,” she tells me in her low alto lilt. Scrolling through them now, they’re strangely hypnotising snapshots of her trademark soundscapes in embryonic form: scatting wordlessly in high-pitch to a funk-infused instrumental; the beginnings of a verse over Afrobeat-esque production; ad-libbing a mournful melody directly over Lil Wayne’s
“Comfortable”, vocals and all, just because the inspiration took her in the moment. At first a little hesitant, she’s now as entertained by them as I am, smiling as she says, “once I close my mouth after I freestyle, I can’t remember what I’ve just done, so these all sound new to me”.
