Zaylevelten: The Underground Alchemist Redefining Nigeria’s Sonic Future
This year in music has delivered a restless mix of moments, especially in the quality of releases. Stakeholders have held wildly polarizing opinions on almost everything: singles, albums, collaborations, even the number of crossover records breaking out of the continent. Some insist it’s a sign of declining quality in West African music, that Afrobeats is losing its essence.
But in the midst of the proclaimed gloom from consumers and critics — and the excessive glut of low-quality drops every New Music Friday across Afrobeats’ sprawling subgenres — a few rays of light have cut through. Here and there, new shrubs of genius have sprung from the now desert-like sonic soil, offering work that feels novel yet deeply resonant. Some of these new acts have, knowingly or not, birthed a new genre in the process of experimenting. One of the most striking of them is Zaylevelten.
Zaylevelten, born Chisom Lucky Okoro, has carved out a niche sound that could only have mutated from sheer instinct, a spark of curiosity, and countless iterations. The result is a level of execution in production, pen, and performance that feels almost clinical. A producer (under the alias “Tenski”) and a rapper rolled into one, his sound is an impossible leap that somehow works. It feels thrilling, borderline unreal, like an idea that should only make sense on paper but somehow exists, fully formed, in the real world.
It’s this novelty, originality, and odd relatability that fuels the mass adoption of his music. For an independent, underground act to funnel so quickly into mainstream visibility is as awe-inspiring as it is improbable.
Zaylevelten’s rise is more than a breath of fresh air; it’s a spotlight on the quiet revolution brewing in the underground. Like him, these artists are alchemists, patiently distilling ideas into experiments that eventually find pockets of devoted communities. When Zaylevelten debuted in 2024 with “No Gree”, a cloud-rap-leaning record clearly influenced by the likes of Playboi Carti and Travis Scott, he bent a subgenre of hip-hop into a fine blend of his own “unique offering of escapism” inviting listeners to live vicariously through semi-relatable tales of reckless vice and hedonistic lenses that many young Nigerians understand intimately. It’s impossible to pinpoint the singular element that converts casual listeners into fans: the quotable lyrics? The high-end, self-steered production? The world-building? The branding? Probably a constellation of all those things.
Across his discography, one thing is clear: Zaylevelten knows the sound he wants to make. He’s never watered it down. His sonic DNA sits confidently at the core of each release, only evolving into what now feels like an eerily predestined tale of mass adoption. His progression from project to project reads prophetic: from the ‘l0cked 1n’ EP in July 2024, to his debut LP ‘bef0re 1t g0t crazy’ that October, to its deluxe a month later. By the time he doubled down with his second studio album, ‘then 1t g0t crazy’ in October 2025 infused with more native textures, bold experimentation, but an even finer execution — it felt like he’d been sitting on a fully matured sound waiting for the world to catch up. The project didn’t just win him overdue attention; it birthed the deluxe ‘then 1t g0t crazier’. And if all this seems too perfectly timed to be accidental, that’s because very little about Zaylevelten’s ascent feels unplanned.
From the very first listens, ‘then 1t g0t crazy’ doesn’t hide how much of an experimental work it is; it is messy in a carefully crafted, intentional way. The production is dusty, glitchy, alté-inflected, trap-tinged, and sometimes disorienting: you get synths that wobble, percussion that lurches unexpectedly, bass that hits like a punch, melodies that float and don’t settle. That uneasy, restless energy makes the project feel more like a psychedelic experience than an album.
Zaylevelten’s “then 1t g0t crazy” rawness is its greatest strength. The unpredictability keeps a listener on edge, demanding that they surrender to the lore and lean in. That ambivalent nature specifically in delivery makes listening to the full tape an immersive, slightly disorienting ride.
Moreover, his cadence and flow feel like they’re carved to match the beat—jittery when the beat jitters, smooth when the beat lets go. There’s aggression when needed, melancholic haze when the mood shifts, and that sense of an artist refusing to conform to preexisting standards. What makes ‘then 1t g0t crazy’ stand out is that Tenski, his alter-ego/producer tag doesn’t just perform on pre-built instrumentals — he builds many of them, with tracks like “Pawon”, “Bali”, and “Fly” being self-produced. That level of control, writing, producing, and engineering means the project feels like a singular vision, a sonic world built from the ground up. The result is a sense of intimacy and rawness: you hear choices and textures that coalesce into mood.
Because the project is so textured linguistically, sonically, emotionally — each listen unearths a new detail. What might sound chaotic the first time slowly reveals patterns: a lingering melody here, a subtle ad-lib there, an unexpected language switch, a shift in energy. The tension between familiarity and alienness becomes its charm that a listener never outgrows, because every time they return, they find something else.
In many ways, Zaylevelten is both the artist and the architect of his rise, building the world he performs in, brick by brick, under his producer alter ego, Tenski. That duality is part of the lore: the rapper who also sculpts his own soundscape, the hitmaker who whispers his own calling card into the music. And as his producer tag, that now-famous “Tenski save me”, continues to echo across clubs, cars, and TikTok edits, it increasingly feels less like mere words and more like a prophecy. And, if there’s any saving to be done, it’s Zaylevelten saving the rest of us from the monotony of the current soundscape, one chaotic, brilliant iteration at a time.
