Afrikan Alien

Pa Salieu still had his three blue prison bags slung over his shoulders when he arrived at Angelic Studios in Oxfordshire, England, at the start of September. The grin he wore, strapped broad across his cheeks, had stayed the journey from the prison gates, too. Pa had just been released after serving 21 months of a near-three-year sentence, handed down for his part in a 2018 brawl following the killing of his friend, Fidel Glasgow. Before his sentencing, Salieu had released a stunning debut album that had him teed up for much bigger things. So once he got back into the studio, he produced a battered A4 notepad and got to work, chronicling his cellblock daydreams on family, freedom, and what it is to be African and feel alien in the UK. These reflections form the backbone of Afrikan Alien, which flits from confrontation to catharsis over a melee of rap, millennial Afrobeats, spiritual mantras, and rolled log drums. It’s a brief rush, at a hair over 27 minutes, but covers a remarkable amount of ground. And as a blueprint for a new, pan-African pop music, it is thoroughly convincing.

He steps with lightness. “Allergy” turns and twitches like a flower’s bloom in timelapse, as Pa whirls over clip-clop percussion, drunk on a mantra: “I’m allergic to the bad vibes…I’m allergic to the BS.” The opening promise of “Belly”—“I been gone for a while, but I still make it back to you”—is at once about a girl, the outside world, and the music itself; the heavier tones of last month’s loosie “Crash” freestyle are notably absent here. It helps that his voice stirs like honey in hot water. He invites Black Sherif, Byron Messia, and ODUMODUBLVCK for a selection of box office cameos—the latter’s tear of a verse on “Big Smile” has the tension release of a race official’s starter pistol. And if there’s such a thing as a winter bop then “Soda,” with its addictive blend of cosy soca syncopation and cool amapiano stabs, is it.

Pa flirts with recognizable styles that have, in recent years, suffused the UK’s pop charts and made global stars of the likes of Burna Boy and Asake. But he constantly tweaks the formulas. His overtures on the title track—“African the alien, moving like he’s nomadic…brought rhythms ’cause the spirit said it”—suggest a fixation on the horizon while carrying the precious cargo of his past with him. Songs like “Dece (Heavy)” and “Regular” thread a line from his grandmother’s car stereo in The Gambia, where Pa grew up, to the tracks trending on YouTube today.

The tape’s heart, though, lies in its most straightforward moment. There’s nothing startling about the solid, sax-and-strings head bop of “YGF,” or anything coded in the chorus the song’s initials come from: “Young, great, and free.” But it provides, with gospel choir backing, the deep, therapeutic exhale that Pa has been ready to release.