When a lot of people think of Benin City, they think about art, and when they think of Benin art, many see the stolen bronzes – sculptures plundered by the British during the invasion – frozen in time in museums around the world. Between that time and now, though, other core guilds have existed in Benin – some by appointment, some by community election, and others by succession. Blacksmiths have been shaping iron through fire; spirit workers laying on hands; mirror makers materialising polished glass from rough sand; and writers analysing the stars and drumming up the future on a page. In Benin, there have always been dancers whirling their hips, shaking red sand from their soles to the sound of something entrancing. Music. Instruments. Chants. Prophecy. Then. Now. In the in-between. We live, and so we keep making. Take, for instance, the night of November 14, 2023.
When Rema slipped into his performer-skin at the London O2 Arena that night, he felt the surreality his work conjures in a way he never had before. Roaming the stage on a dark horse in a nod to Queen Idia, who raised an army and returned home with victory in her hands, a charged and surrendered Rema wore a reworked mask of her face. As he addressed his audience of 20,000 from behind it, the arena fizzed with chilling, quiet gasps. “That night, I felt like a host,” he tells me. “[It was] the first time a person from Benin had performed at the O2; there was no way I was going to perform on that stage without honouring our people. I was in an avatar state. I had to bring the art, the culture, the fears. For the mask, we chose the materials including the stones and their placements so that energy could pass through me from head to toe. Every stone selected was there to activate a different… chakra.” Rema brought both a clear and encrypted message with him that night about the place in which he was born, a place that reveals itself in portions, a storied empire still alive.
When Rema’s second studio album, HEIS, dropped last year, it seemed to startle the industry like a hijack. Foreshadowed by a snippet of the sinister track “HEHEHE”, and then the propulsive “MARCH AM”, the accompanying visualisers centred leather, jewels, a liquefied logo with sharp edges, metal motifs, and bodies shifting in the dark. In an interview with Billboard, Rima Tahini Ighodaro, Mavin Records’ A&R, mentioned that even she was surprised when Rema visited her on maternity leave with a complete album she didn’t know he had recorded. Rema’s music is a vibe, she said: sexy and winding, grungy and audacious. His next release, set to drop over the summer, takes this premise further. His otherworldly vocals shift between thinly-veiled warnings: to industries, maligners, obstacles, life, the past. The lyrics are incensed, assertive, irreverent, hankering. There is no fear there.
Once in many moons, an artist will enter the world and people will respond to the energy their work stirs around itself. The audience will begin to move from their spirits. “I enjoy working on rough beats. It works better for me when they’re not finished. And usually, I won’t do a retake after the true version of what I’m creating, ’cause I’m not after perfection. I’m after it feeling right. And I know when I have it,” he says. Everything on HEIS – the lyrics, the beats, and Rema’s singular ability to conduct his audience while entertaining it – is not just creation or curation, it is a channelling. There are energies attached to the work, he says. “It’s a shame that people misunderstood it. But that’s the price, I guess. Unlike other… cultures, there aren’t many of us repping where we’re from, you know what I mean? So I feel like I have to bring it with me every time. Still, I can’t stop to calculate impact because it’ll distract me. There’s more to do. And I won’t stop until the deed is done.”
“I’m not after perfection. I’m after it feeling right. And I know when I have it”
In the year 2020, when Rema first appeared on the cover of Dazed, he was 19 years old. What can five years do to your courage and sense of purpose, I ask him? How much more of one’s road can unfurl in that time? I’m curious about what he would say to the version of himself we saw back then: “I’d say all of it was worth it. There’s no dream, thought or vision I had that wasn’t valid, and would not come to pass.” Where was he when he found out he had been nominated for a 2025 Grammy for best global music album (he lost to Matt B)? “My team and I were in London. When they told me, I thought, ‘It’s very special that people deep in the industry can see me and what I’m trying to do.’” Five years, he resolves, can prepare you to receive the world you’ve been praying for, can make home safer than ever. “I went back [to Benin], not just to appease after so long of not going home. But also, you know, to show them what we’ve been up to. I connected with old classmates. I went to see the Oba [king] and received my blessings. I went to church and received my blessings.”
We talk more around the new songs – still very much a work in progress – than about them. He has a big year ahead in other senses, too. Starting in April a tour kicks off, including shows in Dakar, New York, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Japan, Sweden and Edmonton, Canada. He has also confirmed Madison Square Garden and Coachella, with an encore at the O2 Arena. Before the year closed, and just after his homecoming concert in Benin in August, he dropped a snippet for his next single, “Baby (Is It a Crime)”, setting the internet ablaze. The song – in which his voice pours over a thudding beat, circling a sample of Sade chopped and screwed by longtime collaborator, producer P.Priime – signposts fresh new directions for the singer. “I put it out because I needed to let the frequency roam in the universe. I hadn’t finished recording yet. Just the hook and the first verse. But you know how some things you release are just a big seed?” he says. “Mhmm, I just needed to sow this one ahead of time.”
When Rema discusses his birth name, Divine Ikubor (given by his mother to commemorate her struggle with his delayed birth), we land naturally on ‘Divine’ one of my favourite songs he’s made, for the story it tells of his arrival into the world and the name he was given thereafter. My life is directed by the meaning of mine, so I want to know: does he feel that being named Divine has shaped his road? “For sure. I don’t like to think too deep into it, but yes. Even in the Bible, God changed the names of people sometimes when their name no longer fit in with their goals or where God was taking them to.”
We journey deep into his childhood, stopping on a night in Benin. “I was in my room in Benin when a bat entered. I couldn’t catch it, I couldn’t kill it because I didn’t know where it was going,” he says. Just like a scene in Batman where Bruce Wayne is swarmed by an animal he is told to be fearful of but feels an instant affinity with, he recalls it as a moment of spiritual awakening. Batman, Rema says, is his current idol. “So I just waited until it flew back out on its own. You never know where bats are going next. I move like that. In my music and my life. Their patience also stands out to me. They know when to retreat, when to lay low, just plotting and lurking until the time is right. Then they come out strong.”
As Edo artists in our separate lanes, we speak in shorthand about transcendental power as a creative source; the kind we were both raised on, the type that shapes your vision from early. He tells me he prefers to watch his from a distance. “Our people have always made art. So yes, when we use that side of us, it shows. It’s different.” The conversation slides down into a reference to “OZEBA” – loosely translated as “Trouble” – a viral song of his that pulls on a sticky horror film of the same name, which we both recall watching on cue. I saw it at my late grandmother’s house in Benin years ago. Rema watched it as a child, too. I tell him I remember the creeping feeling in the air being right there in the room with me, and that what fascinates me about the song is his menace. “Yes, that too can be a power: being able to trap the energy of a film into a song. That feeling of fear, excitement, suspense. It was in the film. Now it’s in a song causing the same feeling in another form. Imagine how long I’d been carrying those emotions… And now it’s out.”
“It was the first time a person from Benin had performed at the O2; there was no way I was going to perform on that stage without honouring our people. I was in an avatar state”
I ask him what element most represents his state of mind at the moment. “Earth,” he says emphatically. “I feel very zen and aligned. Unconsciously I have explored phases that resonate with water, air and fire, and it has helped me to find a balance and clarity. As I explore this phase, I wait to learn from its process.”
Something is coming, he insists. Not just new music or the tour but something epochal, akin to a great spiritual shift within him. “I think a lot about what I do, which people don’t always see, because I’m a quiet person,” he says. Depending on where you’re standing, you may feel a whispering breeze already, that subtle sweep in the air before a gust begins. “At this moment,” Rema says, in the quiet hour we find between his week of flights, meetings and shoots, “not even the deepest fans can tell me they fully understand what I’ve done just yet, until the cycle ends. But it will show soon. And I’m patient.”
Hair NAOMI ROBERTS using NAOSHEAS, make-up MIN SANDHU at THE ONLY AGENCY, set design CHRISTIAN FELTHAM at BRYANT ARTISTS, lighting DARREN KARL SMITH, photographic assistant UGO REYRE, styling assistants MONI JIANG, ZOÉ MINARDLIÉVAIN, AGNESE RIAUDO, tailoring GUILLEM RODRIGUEZ BERNAT, set design assistants TIAGO RUKEL, FREDRIK SVARTNAS, digital operator JOE HART, production FOUDRE PARIS, CONCRETE REP LTD, post-production THE HAND OF GOD, special thanks LABYRINTH
This story features in the spring 2025 issue of Dazed, which is on sale internationally on 6 March 2025. Buy a copy of the magazine here.
