As Tems builds up to the release of a long-awaited, highly anticipated debut album, Love In The Wild, her new single, Love Me Jeje is the latest of three songs released in the lead-up to it. Of these, it carries the most of the Nigerian spirit in sound and style and may be indicative of the direction she takes with the album, Born In The Wild. Tems’ versatility already puts her in a place where she can explore RnB, Dancehall, and more from the comfort of her bespoke soundscape, but for the first time in her blitzing career, she reaches firmly for Afropop.
A lot of the song’s Nigerian identity is encapsulated in its interpolation of Sodimu’s famous “Love me jeje/ love me tender” lines, a sequence that is already a favorite of Nigerian artists from Ric Hassani to Tiwa Savage. She does so in one of the most memorable ways, snapping the iconic lines off the original and placing them on a simple Afropop percussive rhythm. At a time when some of Nigeria’s biggest music stars are looking to jump the ‘Afrobeats’ ship—denouncing the vessel that brought them thus far with the view that it hinders them from advancing further—Tems’ latest release is swerving hard towards it.
Even the video’s imagery, like that of the album’s trailer released a month ago, indicates a heavy Nigerian influence. Tems spends most of Love Me Jeje‘s video surfing through Lagos streets and dancing slowly to her song as the camera cuts between this and another scene shot in a low-vibe club mildly reminiscent of Nigeria’s 90s night scene. At the end of the video, Seyi Sodimu appears in the flesh to dance beside Tems for a few seconds, bringing this episode of culture to a full-circle moment.
But there is more in Tems’ new release than the 27-year-old throwback to Seyi Sodimu’s song and Tems’ ode to Lagos, the city of her birth. Love Me Jeje is Tems’ most outrightly romantic song yet. She is clear about her intentions from its first lines: “I need your lovin’, so fresh, so clean/ Love me in and out, unfailingly.” She maintains that headscape for the song’s entirety, allowing herself to fall vulnerably in love as she hardly has before. It is indicative, at least in part, of the emotional growth that has happened alongside and has been encouraged by her music over the last few years, and it makes for a stark contrast from when she swore off relationships in the past, a decision she attributed in part to previous trauma.
But like she often says in interviews, those dark days before she stumbled into the music industry and struck gold, consisting of a childhood spent navigating a divorce, school bullies, and a career in marketing she had no passion for, are well behind her now. The last half decade has been transcendental for Nigerian music, and Tems has been a key beneficiary and later, driver of this movement. After a couple of self-produced songs first put her before the Nigerian audience, Wizkid arrived to feature her on Essence, the slow-grinding joint that was her ferry to an international audience. Once there, she used the exposure brilliantly; working with stars like Drake, Future, Rihanna, and Beyonce in singing and songwriting capacities.
Now a fixture in the global conversation, Tems will attempt to nail with her debut album what even seasoned Nigerian artists still struggle with: maintaining a sonic balance that keeps both her audiences satisfied. Already she’s taken to social media to express gratitude, and a little surprise, at the reception to Love Me Jeje. For an artist who has seen her releases do significantly better in other countries than in her home, seeing Love Me Jeje get so much acceptance must be heartwarming.
Her new release also, distressingly, captures some of Tems’ struggles. Her lyricism is top of this list. Tems’ simple, unembellished writing hinders her from expressing her emotions with the depth that should serve to properly convey them. Production, too, does not shine on Love Me Jeje, where the duo of Spax and Guiltybeatz are credited. The beat is languid and unchanging, while instrumentation is nearly non-existent, meaning that Tems’ vocals have to carry the water of the song’s entire flow. They just about manage to do so, but the song’s success thus far should not distract from its flaws.
Still, the journey to a golden debut album looks to be very much on course for Tems. Born In The Wild will be her first project in three years and her first body of work since she ascended the heights that she currently rests on. This increased anticipation has only raised the pressure on her to deliver, but she who won this audience has displayed that she possesses all the tools to keep them. Love Me Jeje, though pulled back by avoidable flaws, is a step in the right direction, and one that shows Tems’ growth and versatility, two qualities that we expect to see fleshed out on Born In The Wild.
