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Eight years after the eventful release of Wizkid’s third studio album, Sounds From The Other Side, I would like to say I was one of the early believers, one of those who fervently parried the deluge of criticisms that were lobbied at it upon its release, but unfortunately, I wasn’t. Certainly, I wasn’t in the camp of the denigrators either, a group of which BNXN is an alumnus. To be entirely fair, he wasn’t yet the celebrity he is today, or a celebrity at all. From all indications, he was your average unconcerned teen chasing a dopamine hit by firing off his latest incandescent opinion. But even so, the tweet is no less scathing. “If I say that Daddy Yo song is trash, y’all will probably go mad, so yay! Mad jam!” it reads.
My initial thoughts were less dramatic, more vague, so vague that even I was unsure of my exact feelings towards it. In retrospect, it’s something of a delusion that I first listened to the album on the road. Maybe “road” oversells it a little. I was on a street with a party of friends, we were four in total. We had spent the afternoon ambling, no, roaming, rather aimlessly through the meandering streets that crisscrossed our neighborhood. We had hopped between all our houses, which served as layover points, where we could rest, eat, revel in sily and often titillating gossip, and, of course, play video games. So, thinking back, it’s surprising that I didn’t take advantage of one of our many stops to properly listen to the album, since I knew it was out.
I plugged my white Samsung earphones, those oddly shaped ones where one wire hangs lower than the other, into my ears, and navigated to the album. It was evening, the sun had turned purple-amber and shafts of gentle sunlight filtered into my eyes as I strolled amid friends. Listening to Sweet Love, which opens the album, in this balmy scene felt like an act of providence, like things were playing out just as they should. The song is upbeat, but not so much that it overwhelms or strips you of agency, leaving you the option of either dancing or tuning out. Sweet Love is gentle, inviting, beguiling. It shimmers with a distinctive summery aura; just like a Friday at the beach, steeped in booze, coastal breeze, picturesque scenes, and the tactile feedback of the sand beneath your feet.
The next song? Come Closer, an expansive and gloriously amorphous sound that cross-pollinates Afrobeats with the range of sounds emanating from the Caribbean at the time and the brooding variety of R&B being heralded by acts like Drake and The Weeknd. Even with a Drake feature, he held his own, took up space. The entire song scans as an announcement of his ascendancy. “Came into the game, no one replace me.” What a way to open a song! It flowed in seamlessly from Sweet Love, the first track. It also helped that it was the lead single and the third in a series of Wizkid-Drake collaborations.
The album began to come apart at the seams, for me at least, on track 3: Naughty Ride featuring Major Lazer. My verdict: too noisy. I had a similar opinion of the Chris Brown-assisted African Bad Gyal. It seemed to me that all the sonic elements were competing for the spotlight. The melodies were characteristically immaculate, but whatever pleasure they supplied was undercut by the relentlessly pummeling drums and those horns which are wholly jarring. I spent the rest of my time with the album like a petulant toddler running through a crate of apples by taking a hesitant bite and puckering his face before discarding it for another.
I managed to rescue some gems from the fragments: All For Love featuring Bucie, Picture Perfect, Gbese featuring Trey Songz, and Nobody. But as a body of work, SFTOS left many questions. I would later watch an interview—on Apple Music’s YouTube channel—in which a tangibly younger Wizkid, wearing a neon green hoodie, explains that he thinks of the project as an EP or a mixtape, and that he had originally intended to put it out for free. But at the time, the album’s sonic incongruity left me dazed, and not in a good way. In the coming weeks and months, as the star-studded album failed to occasion the kind of international success that many had projected, the criticism of the album would only intensify. And while I didn’t join the marauding mob, how could I? I liked a handful of the songs. I dawdled on the sidelines, watching it all play out in front of me.
On the 14th of July, 2025, the album turned eight. I had hardly scrolled twice before I started to see rhapsodic tweets about the album. Tweets praising the album for its innovative bent filled my feed. “This album was way ahead of its time,” appeared several times. In an interesting turn of events, BNXN posted a series of videos in which he passionately sings along to songs from the album. At some point, in one of the videos, he pauses and releases an excited gasp. “Cheee… Wizzy.” Given the visceral memory I have of the deluge of criticism the album initially received, the near-universal love it received on its eighth anniversary felt incongruous, almost. It felt like one of those movies in which the protagonist lands in an alternative universe, one that's almost a near replica of their original timeline, save for a few tiny details.
For all my surprise, the reality is that the critical opinion of the album has progressively softened over the years. One reason for this is that, bar a few exceptions, as projects recede in time, we tend to subliminally confer them with added heft, nudging them towards the rarified corpus we describe as “classics.” Humans tend to remember the past more fondly, reserving our indignation for the present and our anxieties for the future. Remember how we would bemoan the quality of old Nollywood films and compare them with their American counterparts? Isn't it poetic that these very films are now venerated for qualities such as faithfulness to portraying a close approximation of the Nigerian experience and the good-natured humor of many of these films?
But beyond this, the album’s reputation has soared because when we listen to songs like One For Me, Picture Perfect, Nobody, and Come Closer, we recognize the early germs of what would become the distinctive flavour of Afro-R&B that Wizkid has now perfected, the aural aesthetic that has ensured his continued relevance and produced songs like Essence, Frames and Slow. As such, the album has become something of a shorthand for the intervening phase in an artist’s career in which they lean into experimentation in search of something fresh. In defending Asake’s current phase, his fans tend to describe it as his SFTOS era. I have also witnessed this characterization being invoked in defence of other similarly left-field and misunderstood projects. SFTOS is not without its flaws, some of the transitions still feel wonky and the lack of a thematic anchor still takes its toll on the listening experience, but in an age where experimentation feels like an antique from a distant past, SFTOS is tangible proof of the merits of sonic innovation.
