Sometimes the 19-year-old who penned “give me that roach-infested pussy, girl” turns around and makes one of the most moving jazz albums in recent memory. We contain multitudes. Nigerian-born, Houston-based producer heavensouls (b. Chidi Obialo) became a RateYourMusic darling last year as one part of The Sidepeices, alongside Atlanta’s Stickerbush. Despite the Texas-to-Georgia connection, this was not a Southern rap record by any stretch. 2025’s Darkskin N***as with Lightskin Problems was an all-out glitch-hop assault, grabbing from Death Grips’ clubbiest moments, RXKNephew’s unhinged sense of humor, and Arca’s overstimulation station.
The duo released a follow up, the IDM-hyperpop-rap collage Darklight, earlier this year but heavensouls’ solo offering westside trapped entirely disposes of the shitpost-y moments from his previous collabs. This is an album firmly based on the producer’s Nigerian identity and the country’s jazz history. The influence of Fela Kuti permeates the album, as do heavensouls’ digicore ancestry. On opener “heyjah obialo,” his rumbling voice lists off expensive shit before singing “this song too…,” interrupted by clattering drums and a blown-out sax solo like his thoughts were hit with an NDA. Kuti is not only Nigeria’s greatest-ever musician, but a political firebrand whose lesson to heavensouls appears to be that melody must always serve the rhythm. The one moment of silliness on westside trapped is the band credits with a ramshackle list of players: hunter b, iyifolu teron, and lyric obialo, alongside heavensouls, are credited on percussion.
The layering across the album is astonishing. heavensouls treats snippets of sampled R&B as another piece of a rhythmic puzzle, turning vocal stems into beat fodder rather than their own melodic features. He allows samples to have digital particulates sticking to them, small stretch marks and clipping from old Audacity files. It adds to the sound on “playing around wit a flip” when a synthesized choir appears, a Bobby V clip, and all those digital artifacts are slathered onto the ambiance, blending into the wall. What’s live? What’s sampled? What was recorded on an iPhone in the sweltering Houston heat? There are plenty of moments that sound like a brilliant live mix off a Roland sampler, or a DJ constantly one-upping their previous beat switches. “creek ala” has a skittering drum performance like a marching band routine that suddenly dissolves into a gorgeous swirling kora, a Gambian harp.
There are many West African guitar parts—often sunny but always staccato and fusing with the drums, especially on “playing around wit a flip.” The propelling, staccato guitar has a sense of forward momentum that eggs on the entire album’s restless energy. heavensouls’ occasional deployment of Auto-Tune nods to modern Nigerian artists like Burna Boy, proving he’s got pop chops amongst the thornier moments. heavensouls also named JPEGMAFIA as a major influence, and especially “Jesus Forgive Me I am a Thot”’s open-YouTube-tabs-style beat is all over westside trapped.
But where Peggy gleefully indulged in confusing chaos, heavensouls focuses on miraculous fusion. His version of the expanding Epic Collage genre is more coherent than the fever dream Los Thuthanaka but tinkers with a similar ethos. Chuquimamani-Condori and Joshua Chuquimia Crampton explored gender roles and colonialism through terror and bedlam. heavensouls is also a maximalist, but he still wants you to dance your ass off. The brilliant, high-life twist of “creek ala” is undeniable, as is the slinky “playing around wit a flip” and humid, grooving “straight rawhhhhhhhhh.”
heavensouls’ voice, when not slathered in Auto-Tune, is often a low growl, like he’s been gargling gravel. Closer “o di gbere,” despite its blissed-out, New-Age vibe, can be translated from Yoruba as “he became mad.” In the blurb on westside trapped’s Bandcamp page, heavensouls explains how “nigeria has been bombed, imperialized, exploited and abused. artistically nigeria has also been robbed of the opportunity for their art to hit the west a variety of times. this is a love letter not only to nigerian art but the country that birthed, clothed and bred me.” There must be something bewildering about moving from Nigeria, for decades now exploited for its oil by the United States, international companies, and others, only to wind up in Houston, a city (and state) built on the wealth of fossil fuels.
Album zenith “shed a tear for me” has heavensouls singing Eric Garner’s last words (“I can’t breathe”) over and over, hovering above jittering drums and reverb soaked piano. heavensouls shows his restraint by allowing the percussion to slowly grow before suddenly cutting it off and introducing a snarling bass line. He’s got a street magician’s panache for reintroducing motifs like he’s smirking, “Is this your card?” The Navy Blue-like piano vamp that opens “shed a tear for me” reappears in snippets before leading the song to its post-rock freakout with two separate guitar feedback walls. It’s the only time on the album where heavensouls allows things to collapse into anarchy, but by that point he’s earned it. “shed a tear for me” is a howl of rage and sorrow, roaring with unspeakable pain, only that heavenly slice of piano acting as an anchoring point in the madness.
There’s a tendency to focus on a prodigy’s age and what they could do in the future. But that obscures what heavensouls has already done as a teenager. The potential on display here is otherworldly. westside trapped on its own is a remarkably self-assured, virtuosic effort, sparkling with the type of righteous anger that can lead to joy. heavensouls layers a multitude of drum tracks over each other, creating these monstrous, lumbering beasts of rhythm that interlock at strange angles. Every track on the album feels like it’s on the verge of total collapse but will suddenly find a moment to mesh into something stunning. [CAPERFLOWER]
Nathan Stevens is a musician, archivist, and podcaster whose work has appeared in Spectrum Culture, Stereogum, and Popmatters. He currently runs the music interview website Woodhouse.
