Just when we had started to put the idea of major music project releases to rest—a few weeks before the end of last year—Wizkid and Asake, two of the most exciting acts this year, announced a joint tape set for release later this month. “Special announcement,” Wizkid bellowed, in the early hours of Friday morning last week during his appearance at the Apple Music Radio Takeover, wearing a dark sweater and oval-shaped sunglasses. “2025, Mr Money-Big Wiz project. And it drops this December,” he continued. At which point, Asake, wearing a dark t-shirt and a svelte chain, began to intersperse Wizkid’s address with encouraging quips: “Oh yes!” “Olorun!” “On God!”
While this announcement took us all by surprise, in a sense, it seems only fitting. Both acts delivered an impressive year through a mix of high-impact musical collaborations and statement-making performances, including celebrated orchestral concerts in the US. This seemed to foreshadow new music, a project of sorts, which never quite materialized. In the case of Asake, anticipation for his project reached a fever pitch around the third quarter of this year. By then, he had relentlessly teased an album tentatively titled M$NEY through countless snippets and aesthetic revamps. With each new look—his scruffy era, his military garb era, his slicked blue hair era, his low cut era, his bald era, his corporate fit era—fans, well accustomed to guessing games celebrities often enact with their fans, would predict the imminence of the album, which would ultimately fail to materialize.
December came and went without this project surfacing. Details on this new project remain sparse. All we have to speculate is the title: Real; and a new estimated timeline for release—sometime within the first quarter of this year, according to industry whispers. I however would advise against taking this as face value, Wizkid is notorious for making glib promises only to either deliver on them later than expected or throw them out the window. I still recall him, on the O2 stage during his 2021 performance with Burna Boy, promising to release B.D’OR at exactly midnight—the song dropped weeks after.
His magnum opus, Made in Lagos, arrived years after it was promised (thankfully, it was worth the wait.) There’s also his grand promise, after a Lagos performance in 2023, that fans would no longer have to pay to see him in Lagos. “With the kind of love you guys show me, it’s very unfair for me to do shows around the world and still make you guys pay to watch me perform. I want to make a promise tonight, this is the last time you’re ever going to pay to come to a Wizkid show.” This December, he performed at the Tafawa Balewa Stadium, with some regular tickets costing as high as 150 thousand Naira. The collaborative project and tour he announced with Davido in 2023, will probably never materialize given the increasingly strained relationship between the Afrobeats stars. There’s however good reason to believe that Asake and Wizkid’s joint tape will make it out of their hard drives: the duo have not just offered promises, they have begun a marketing campaign, starting with their Apple Music Radio Takeover appearance, to drum up anticipation for Real.
It’s unclear what format Wizkid and Asake’s imminent project will take, if it does indeed drop. An album, however, seems unlikely. Going by Wizkid’s proclivity for EPs that punctuate periods between his albums, Real will most likely be an EP, one replete with bangers given that it was initially scheduled to drop during the festive season. And if their previous collaborations—MMS, Bad Girl, and Getting Paid—anything to go by Real could wind up as one of the projects that will set the tone for 2026, which is already looking like an interesting year for music.
