To listen to Asake’s fourth studio album M$NEY is to encounter an artist who has outgrown the need for spectacle. The Nigerian sonic pace-setter no longer sounds like a man sprinting toward destiny; he sounds like someone seated comfortably inside it. This is not the breathless Asake of first arrival, the street-pop revivalist who burst through the doors of Afrobeats with chants that felt half-ecstatic, half-incantatory.
M$NEY is also Asake’s first album released under his own imprint, Giran Republic, a quiet but significant shift that sits in the background of the record’s assured tone.
There was a time when each Asake album felt like a public event, a communal jolt to the nervous system of Nigerian pop. Mr. Money With The Vibe(2022), Work of Art(2023), Lungu Boy(2024), these were records that moved with the velocity of breakthrough, as though the music itself were trying to outrun obscurity. On M$NEY, that velocity gives way to something else: affluent composure.
What is striking here is not what Asake changes, but what he refuses to. The familiar architecture remains intact: the log drum pulse, the elastic marriage of chant and melody, the rhythmic phrasing that has become unmistakably his. For an artist once praised for nudging his own template into new shapes with each project, this steadiness may initially feel like repetition. But sit with the record long enough and the intention reveals itself.
Much of that consolidation happens in the hands of Magicsticks, whose production across the album feels almost novelistic in its emotional range. The instrumentals are lush without being indulgent, expressive without demanding attention. There are moments when a saxophone phrase or percussive texture says more than any lyric could hope to. You begin to notice that you are feeling the songs before you are decoding them. The beats do not accompany Asake; they anticipate him, cradle him, occasionally outshine him.
This dynamic produces one of the album’s most curious pleasures. Asake’s voice often functions less as narrator and more as participant. He drifts through these sonic rooms like a man familiar with the furniture, occasionally rearranging it, but mostly allowing the atmosphere to speak. His lyrics lean toward gratitude, reflection, invocations of ease and divine favour, themes that, in less assured hands, might feel trite. Here, they feel lived-in. Not profound in their poetry, but persuasive in their sincerity.
And yet, there will be listeners who find this cohesion unsettling. The grooves are recognisable. The rhythmic turns are predictable. The album rarely startles. For an artist whose earlier work thrived on a kind of ecstatic unpredictability, M$NEY can feel almost too comfortable, like watching a virtuoso perform scales he has long since mastered.
But comfort, in this context, is the point. Asake is no longer interested in demonstrating range. He is interested in demonstrating ownership. This album plays like the work of someone who has internalised his influence so thoroughly that experimentation feels unnecessary. He is not searching for new ground; he is tending to the land he already claimed.
There is a psychological shift embedded in that choice. Where previous records sounded like the euphoria of ascent, M$NEY sounds like the contemplation that follows arrival. Wealth here is not a boast but a backdrop. The music carries the easy gait of someone who no longer needs to prove he can run.
