Five years is enough time for a music scene to reinvent itself. In that time, Afrobeats expanded globally, Alté matured, and new sounds emerged from every corner of the diaspora. Through it all, Joey B stayed mostly quiet. Sexy Highlife, his third studio album and first major project since 2020’s Lava Feels, arrives as both a return and a reset.
The album’s central idea is simple: What happens when Ghanaian Highlife meets New York’s Sexy Drill?
Inspired by his time in New York’s underground scene in 2024, Joey B borrows the sensual, 808-heavy textures popularized by Cash Cobain and lays them over the warm, melodic framework of Highlife. The result is a record that feels familiar and new at the same time. It is rooted in Ghana, but its ears are turned toward the world.
Across its nine tracks, Sexy Highlife moves with the confidence of an artist who understands both his past and his possibilities. Songs like Akosua Broni and Princess draw from the legacy of Highlife icon Daddy Lumba, turning nostalgia into something contemporary. They do not treat the past as a museum piece; they treat it as living material.
The guest list is equally deliberate. Bisa Kdei brings traditional Highlife weight, Bosom P-Yung adds youthful unpredictability, and Odunsi (The Engine) helps extend the album’s reach into the alternative sounds of West Africa. Each feature feels less like a commercial decision and more like another thread in the album’s cultural tapestry.
Even the song titles — Suzzy Williams, Yaa Abrefi, Akosua Broni, Kyeiwaa — are steeped in Ghanaian memory. They remind you that, despite its global influences, this is a deeply Ghanaian project. The album’s references to popular culture, names, and collective memory ground it firmly in home soil. No matter how far the music travels sonically, it never loses sight of where it comes from.
That balance between movement and rootedness is perhaps Sexy Highlife‘s greatest achievement. The album understands something fundamental about African genres: they have always evolved through migration, exchange, and adaptation. Highlife itself was born from cultural intersections. In many ways, Joey B’s experiment is not a departure from Highlife’s history but an extension of it.
The greatest strength of Sexy Highlife is not that it creates a new genre. It is that it proposes a new way of thinking about Highlife. Joey B suggests that the genre can travel, absorb new influences, and still remain itself. He argues, implicitly, that cultural preservation and experimentation are not opposing ideas.
After five years away, he has not returned to repeat what he has done before. He has returned to ask a question: How many futures can Highlife still have?
Sexy Highlife does not answer that question completely. But it makes a compelling case that the possibilities are far from exhausted. More importantly, it reminds us that the most enduring genres are not the ones that resist change, but the ones brave enough to keep becoming something new.
