Tems Then vs Now: The Evolution of Nigeria's Biggest Female Voice

In late 2018, Temilade Openiyi was a software engineer in Lagos uploading a song called “Mr Rebel” to her own SoundCloud page. She had self-produced it. She had self-released it. She had no label, no manager with a real Rolodex, and no machinery behind her. The song moved on its own through Twitter and a small constellation of Lagos tastemakers, the kind of audience that finds you because the song is strange enough to be remembered. The voice on the record was already what it would still be eight years later: a low, ash-soft alto that sat where most Nigerian female vocalists never sat, somewhere underneath the men instead of on top of them.

To understand how far Tems has traveled, you have to start with that specific anomaly. Nigerian pop in 2018 ran on bright, upper-register female features. The dominant vocal palette was the slightly nasal, ululating tone Yemi Alade and Tiwa Savage had refined, which descended from older Naija pop forms and from gospel choir training. Tems sounded like none of that. She sounded like she had been listening to Sade, Lauryn Hill, Asa, and a lot of dub. The fact that she produced her own beats, often skeletal arrangements with one keyboard pad and a programmed kick, meant the voice was always exposed. There was nothing to hide behind, and she did not seem to want anything to hide behind.

The Try Me Inflection Point

“Try Me” arrived in September 2019. It is, in retrospect, the song that made the rest of the career legible. The arrangement is almost embarrassingly sparse, a slow log-drum pattern, a few synth chords, and that voice doing the thing where it slides into a phrase from underneath rather than landing on it cleanly. The lyric was a warning to a man who had tried to push her around, and the delivery had no rage in it, just a flat, settled confidence that made the rage unnecessary.

The song crossed over to wider Naija radio without anyone really pushing it. It went up on Apple Music’s Africa Now editorial. It started getting flipped on Instagram. By early 2020 “Try Me” had become the kind of song other artists referenced in interviews when asked about new Nigerian voices, which is usually the first sign that the industry has noticed something it cannot yet categorize. She released the For Broken Ears EP in September 2020 and the EP did the second thing that matters here: it proved “Try Me” was not a one-song accident. “Damages” and “Higher” sat in the same emotional register, the same compositional restraint, the same refusal to bend toward Naija-pop convention.

It is worth saying plainly what was unusual. Almost every successful Nigerian female artist before Tems had been forced into one of two roles, the love-song romantic lead or the dancefloor diva. Tems was working a third lane that did not really exist in the market yet, a kind of R&B-adjacent introspection with Afrobeat low end. The closest reference point internationally was probably Sault or Cleo Sol. The closest reference point domestically was Asa, and Asa had spent most of her career on a different commercial trajectory entirely.

Essence and the Globalization Moment

In 2020 Wizkid invited her onto a song called “Essence” for Made in Lagos. The story she has told in interviews, including a 2021 sit-down with Apple Music’s Ebro Darden, is that she recorded her parts at home and Wizkid built the rest around her. The song was not a single at first. It was a deep cut, track 11 of 14. Then TikTok happened to it in mid-2021, and then radio in the United States happened to it, and then Justin Bieber jumped on the remix in August 2021, and “Essence” became the song that Billboard would eventually credit as the first Nigerian-led record to crack the Hot 100 top 10.

What that did for Tems specifically is hard to overstate. She was not the lead artist. But the hook was hers, and the hook was the whole song. American listeners who had never heard of Wizkid before 2021 were Googling Tems by name. The voice was the thing they kept coming back to, that low, blurred quality that sat completely outside the loud Top 40 vocal style of that year. Future called her about Drake’s “Wait For U” in early 2022. The sample of “Higher” sat at the front of that song too, and when “Wait For U” debuted at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in May 2022, Tems became the first female Nigerian artist to top that chart.

By the time she won the Grammy for Best Melodic Rap Performance for that record in February 2023, the global press had already moved her into a different category. She was no longer being written about as “a Nigerian Afrobeats artist.” She was being written about as a vocalist in the same paragraph as H.E.R. and Daniel Caesar, which is closer to where her actual influences live.

The Songwriting Maturation

People talk about Tems’ voice constantly. They do not talk enough about her writing. The lyrical evolution from “Try Me” to “Free Mind” to the songs on Born in the Wild is real. The early material leans on direct, almost confrontational address. “Try me, I go show you say me I no dey carry last.” It is plain-spoken and Lagos-specific.

By “Free Mind,” released originally on For Broken Ears in 2020 but blowing up in 2022 after TikTok, the writing is more abstract and more spiritually loaded. “Lord, give me a moment of peace, in my mind there’s a lot of beasts.” The line lets two readings sit on top of each other, the personal and the cosmic, without picking one. That ambiguity, the willingness to leave the listener inside the question, became the dominant mode on Born in the Wild, her debut album released in June 2024.

Born in the Wild is the project where you can hear her writing in long arcs rather than song-by-song. “Burning” works as the emotional inverse of “Free Mind.” “Love Me JeJe,” her reinterpretation of the Seyi Sodimu 1997 highlife record, is a study in how to remake a Nigerian classic without flattening it. The decision to keep the original’s pidgin chorus and rebuild only the production around it is the kind of editorial choice that signals a writer who has stopped being afraid of the tradition she came out of.

The Live Show, Then and Now

The early Tems live show, the one she was doing in small Lagos rooms in 2019 and 2020, was modest. A laptop, a couple of musicians, her voice up front and unprocessed. The voice was the entire show. There was no choreography because there did not need to be any. People who went to those early sets describe a room that fell completely quiet when she got to the verses on “Damages,” which is a thing that almost never happens at a Nigerian show.

The live operation now is a different machine. Her 2023 If Orange Was a Place tour put her in 2,500 to 4,000-cap rooms across North America and Europe. The 2024 Born in the Wild tour, supporting the album, moved her into theatres and a few small arenas, including the Greek in Los Angeles and Wembley Arena in London. The band has grown. The arrangements have grown. The stage design now includes the orange-and-forest visual language of the album rollout, which she has been involved in shaping personally, according to her interviews with Vogue and The Cut in 2024.

What has not changed is the central performance choice. She still does long, unaccompanied vocal passages where the band drops out completely and the room has to hold its breath. The fact that she can do this in a 12,000-cap venue without losing the audience is the actual technical achievement. Most singers cannot.

The Posture Shift

The early Tems interviews, around 2020, are noticeably guarded. Short answers, no posturing, very little discussion of process. She came across as someone who was wary of the music business and did not want to overshare with it. Read the interviews from 2024 and 2025, particularly her long conversation with Zane Lowe on Apple Music around the album release, and you can hear a different person. She is willing now to talk about the writing in granular detail, about the role of faith in her work, about why she turned down certain features.

Some of this is just the natural arc of a young artist becoming a senior one. Some of it is the protection that commercial success confers. But there is also a specific Nigerian dimension worth naming. For most of the last 15 years, the international story of Afrobeats has been a story about men. Wizkid, Davido, Burna Boy, Rema, Asake. The women who broke through, Tiwa Savage and Yemi Alade most prominently, did it by hitting marks the men had already set. Tems did not do that. She broke through by sounding like none of the men and refusing to be programmed against them.

What She Is Building Now

In 2024 she launched her own label, Leading Vibe Records, and signed a small initial roster including the singer Sevyn. She has talked in interviews about wanting to develop other female Nigerian vocalists who do not fit the existing template. Whether that label becomes a serious industry player or stays as a personal-project imprint is an open question, and the honest read is that label-building is its own discipline that has nothing to do with being a great singer.

The other thing to watch is the producer side. She is still producing or co-producing most of her own material, which puts her in a very small group of A-list global pop artists who hold both roles. Most singers at her commercial level have long since handed the boards over to outside producers. Tems has not, and the sonic identity of her records is partly a function of that refusal.

The voice she walked into the studio with in 2018, the low, smoky, deliberately under-the-beat instrument that no one in Lagos pop was using, is the same voice she walked onto the Grammys stage with in 2023 and the Olympics opening ceremony with in 2024. The career was not built by changing it. The career was built by trusting that it was already the right voice and waiting, for almost three years, for the rest of the world to catch up.

The Comparison Nobody Quite Wants to Make

You can run a thought experiment with Tiwa Savage. Tiwa is the closest analogue in the Nigerian female-artist canon, a singer who moved between Naija pop and global R&B fluency with real skill, who signed to Mavin in 2012, who put out “Kele Kele Love” and “Eminado” and “All Over.” She had the harder version of the road, in the sense that she had to do it without the streaming-first global music economy that Tems benefited from. She had to fight the older Nigerian industry’s discomfort with a female lead in a way that Tems, debuting almost a decade later, did not.

What is different is the framing. Tiwa Savage was always being measured against the men around her, often by people who could not really hear what she was doing. Tems came into a moment where the international press wanted a Nigerian female lead voice and was already primed to take her seriously. She also benefited from the work Tiwa, Yemi Alade, Asa, and Waje had done to make a Nigerian female solo career commercially imaginable in the first place. The continuity matters. Pretending Tems sprang from nothing is the kind of mistake casual writers make.

Inside Nigeria there is also a generational shift in what fans expect from a female star. The Tiwa Savage era assumed a singer would be a full entertainment package: dance choreography, fashion magazine covers, brand ambassadorships, a glamorous persona that worked in tabloids. Tems has done less of that. She does Vogue covers, but she has been visibly uncomfortable with the celebrity-machine side of the business. Her Instagram is sparse. She gives few interviews. The fact that she has been able to skip the conventional Naija-pop celebrity script and still operate at the top of the global charts is the part of her career that other young female Nigerian artists are watching most closely.

The Open Question

The honest open question about Tems is whether the discipline scales. The career so far has been built on extreme selectivity: few features, few releases, few collaborations, long gaps between projects. That selectivity is part of the brand. It is also a hard thing to sustain when the industry around you is moving on a 12-month album cycle and the streaming algorithms reward constant new uploads. Burna Boy has resolved this by releasing dense, frequent albums. Wizkid has resolved it by releasing infrequent but rollout-heavy projects. Tems has, so far, resolved it by simply not playing the cycle game.

Whether that holds in five years is the question. The Tems of 2026 is still in many ways the Tems of 2019, just with a Grammy on the shelf and a passport stamped in every major city. The voice is the same. The compositional restraint is the same. The unwillingness to do anything she does not want to do is the same. The career has scaled up around a center that has refused to move. That is rare in pop, and it is the actual reason the story is interesting.