In Conversation with Tobi Oke
There is a particular kind of Lagos evening that only makes sense if you understand what it means to be in demand. The kind where your phone has not stopped since morning, where the calendar is stacked, where every notification is someone asking for a piece of you because something you made has started moving in ways you could not have predicted even six months ago. That was the evening I spoke with Solana.
She joined the call warm and unhurried, which said something on its own. Because by the time we spoke, Okunkun had already done what it did to the internet, and for someone whose evenings were probably now filling up with performance requests and booking enquiries, the version of Solana I met was remarkably unbothered by all of it. Present. Curious. Laughing easily. She had somewhere to be after us, her manager was already circling, and she gave us the time anyway.
That detail, more than any single thing she said, is what stayed with me.
Before the timeline found her, before the reposts and the booking requests and the people from countries she has never visited telling her they cannot stop listening, there was just a girl from Lagos making music that felt true to her. Music rooted in Yoruba, in heritage, in the specific texture of a culture that does not need translation to be felt. She was not building a movement. She was just building her sound.
But movements have a way of forming around the right kind of honesty. And somewhere between the first viral reel and the internet’s attempt to explain what it was hearing, a word appeared. Yorupop.
It spread the way these things do, in comments, in replies, in the shorthand of people who needed something to call what Solana was doing. Contemporary pop sensibility fused with Yoruba language and cultural identity. A bridge between the traditional and the present. Between where African music came from and where it is clearly going. The internet named it. Solana became its face.
Her full name is Ogunlana Busolami Habibat. Her stage name came from two pieces of herself, Sola from her first name, Lana from her last name. Simple, personal, and quietly telling of how she moves through everything else. She does not reach for something external to define her. She takes what is already there and shapes it into something that sounds right. Yorupop, it turns out, works exactly the same way.
She is calling in from Lagos, and when I ask her to paint me a picture of where she is, she almost laughs at the question before answering simply. Lagos. Nigeria. Which, given everything that has happened around her recently, feels like the right kind of grounding.
“It has been super great,” she says when I ask about life since Okunkun landed. “It went from zero to a hundred and something. The support has been insane. So many people reaching out. Just a really great experience so far.”
The thing about that sentence is how understated it is for what actually happened. Okunkun did not gradually find its audience. It detonated. Within hours of her second Instagram post, she was watching the views climb and refreshing in disbelief. A thousand. Two thousand. More. She kept asking herself what was going on. The answer, as it turned out, was that she had been right all along about a song that the industry had spent three years telling her was wrong.
Because Okunkun is not a 2026 song. Solana wrote and recorded it in 2023. She played it for people in the music space. The responses were consistent and discouraging. “They told me, I don’t really think Nigerians are listening to this. This is not a Nigerian sound. I had so many rejections on this song.” She pauses before she continues, and in that pause you can feel the weight of three years of doubt.
“When you have gotten so many rejections, you start feeling like, am I making the right thing here? But I knew this was a really great record. So I was just feeling, you know what, I am just going to put it out. Whatever happens, happens.”
What happened was the timeline. What happened was Yoruba-speaking and non-Yoruba-speaking fans alike stopping mid-scroll to ask who this was. What happened was Ayra Starr, Tiwa Savage, and Tems all pressing repost on the same song within days of each other. What happened was people from countries that have never produced a single Afrobeats record messaging Solana to tell her they could not stop listening even though they did not understand a word she was singing.
“That is what music is supposed to do,” she says. “It is supposed to bring people together. An invitation into indigenous culture. When you listen, you are just in that headspace, enjoying another culture.”
The cultural conversation around her sound has taken on a life of its own. People online have called it Yorupop. The Lijadu Sisters have been invoked repeatedly in comments and replies, the word reincarnation appearing more than once. Solana receives the comparison with genuine warmth and immediately, gently, steps around it.
“I would not say my sound is Yorupop. Yorupop is just another expression of who Solana is. It is part of the things that make me. When I was recording, I was just creating something that connects to my heritage, my present generation, my childhood. Yoruba is the language I know, so I am going to express myself in it. But my general sound is not Yorupop. It is just another extension of who I am as an artist.”
As for the Lijadu Sisters, she is honoured. But she was not tapping from them as a source. She was just being herself, and the lineage found her.
That line between intention and instinct runs through every part of her creative process, including the part most people do not know about yet. Solana and Killertunes have been working together since 2019. Seven years. Almost every song in her catalogue carries his fingerprints. His brothers are part of her management team. She uses the word family without any performance in it, because that is what it actually is.
“We have worked for so long that we understand each other’s creativity,” she says. “We understand each other’s sound. We literally just flow. And there is so much stuff we have that people have never heard. They will be like, what.”
The EP dropping in October is fully produced by Killertunes. Seven songs. No features. Just the two of them, and whatever they have been quietly building together since before most of her current listeners were paying attention.
Even the visuals, which have drawn their own wave of admiration and dissection online, come from the same unhurried place. I ask her about them because the short-form content around Okunkun feels considered without feeling controlled, and she almost laughs at the implication of a grand strategy behind it.
“It is literally a family thing. His brothers, his wife, me. We just drive around and look for places to shoot. We dress up, we find somewhere, we shoot. We are just living our lives. So when people are like, how did you plan this, we are just being our normal Tuesday.”
There is something quietly radical about that. In an industry that rewards the performance of strategy, Solana and her people have built something that looks effortless because it largely is. Not careless. Genuine. And the authenticity, she is clear, is not something to abandon now that it is working.
“It is the authenticity that drew people in. So why should I stop that?”
Before we wrap up, because her manager is already waiting and the evening is filling up, I mention that I play COD and she plays Fortnite and we should probably sort something out. She laughs with a confidence that does not need to explain itself.
“If you come to me in Fortnite, you are going to cry.”
I kind of believe her. Well until she proves it anyway.
The EP drops in a few weeks. Seven songs. No features. Just Solana, Killertunes, and whatever happens when an artist stops asking for permission and starts trusting her instinct.
Whatever happens, happens. It has been working out well so far.
