Ycee, the Nigerian rapper who stormed the scene with Jagaban and redefined cool for a generation has gone quiet. We look back at the music that made him impossible to ignore.
There’s a specific kind of ache that comes with watching a truly talented artist fade from the conversation. Not disappear, exactly, more like recede. Like a frequency you can still feel but can no longer quite hear. That’s Ycee in 2026. Oludemilade Martin Alejo, the Festac Town-born rapper who decided the ocean could wait because Lagos needed his bars, is technically still out there. Still active on socials. Still occasionally teasing new music. But if you’ve been waiting for the artist who once sold out the O2 Academy Islington and charted on Billboard’s Next Big Sound to make his proper comeback, you know the silence has been loud.
When Ycee broke through in 2015, the Nigerian music industry was deep in its Afrobeats golden era; Davido, Wizkid, and Olamide were running things, and the question on everyone’s lips was whether Nigerian rap could ever punch at the same weight class as the pop gods. Ycee didn’t answer that question so much as make it irrelevant. He was never about competition. He was about craft; braggadocious flows shot through with street honesty, silk-smooth hooks that could turn any bar in Lagos into a cathedral, and a willingness to collaborate so generously that his features often became the best parts of other people’s projects.
He signed with Tinny Entertainment, then Sony Music (becoming one of the first Nigerian rappers to do so), then broke from both to found his own label, ANBT — Ain’t Nobody Badder Than. His 2019 album Ycee vs. Zaheer was a fifteen-track examination of his two creative identities: the uncompromising rapper and the melodic pop craftsman. The rap songs were the best on it. The critics were mixed. Life moved on.
But the catalog doesn’t lie. And what Ycee built between 2015 and 2022 is a body of work that deserves its proper flowers — right now, while we’re still wondering where he went.
Here are the ten songs that made Ycee a legend.
1. Jagaban (Remix) ft. Olamide
Every origin story has its myth, and Ycee’s begins here. The original Jagaban was already a statement, a swaggering, bass-heavy street anthem that announced a new voice in the room. But the remix, which came after Olamide himself reached out to be featured, elevated the song into a generational document.
This is how Ycee’s legend was partly built: not just by being talented, but by attracting the attention of the right people at the right time. Olamide, the king of the Lagos streets and arguably the most dominant force in Nigerian rap, didn’t feature on just anyone’s track. That he called Ycee said everything. Together, they turned Jagaban into a street coronation; Olamide blessing Ycee in full view of Lagos, the city watching. This eventually earned Ycee a nomination for Revelation of the Year at the MTV Africa Music Awards. It set the table for everything that followed.
Real ones know: the remix is the version.
2. Juice ft. Maleek Berry
Jagaban might have been the arrival of Ycee’s prominence, but Juice was his transformation. Released as part of Ycee’s debut EP The First Wave, the Maleek Berry-assisted record didn’t just chart, it also topped Playdata’s Nigeria radio rankings at number one in June 2017 and did something rarer: it defined a mood for an entire generation of Nigerian youth.
Juice was the sound of Lagos in bloom. It was Afrobeats with a West Coast shimmer, a record that sounded equally at home in a Lekki apartment and at a summer rooftop party in London. Maleek Berry brought his signature melodic sophistication; Ycee matched it bar for bar. The two performed the track together at Jay-Z’s Made in America festival, a moment that felt like a planetary alignment, Nigerian talent on American soil, claiming space they’d earned.
To talk about music that redefined what cool sounded like in Nigeria in the mid-2010s, Juice has to be the starting point. The era of Juice wasn’t just a song. It was a sensibility.
3. Omo Alhaji
Pure Lagos. That’s what Omo Alhaji is. A flexing, infectious party track about the particular swagger of someone who grew up in privilege but earned their way to something greater, the son of a big man who became a big man himself. Ycee rode it with the ease of someone who wasn’t trying, which is the hardest thing to fake.
The official music video crossed 5.9 million YouTube views. DJ Maphorisa came through on the remix, adding a South African dimension that turned the song into a Pan-African anthem. Omo Alhaji was also Ycee’s early proof of concept: that he could make purely celebratory music without sacrificing an ounce of authenticity.
4. Dakun
From his debut album Ycee vs. Zaheer, Dakun was the record that proved the rapper hadn’t gone soft on the pivot toward more melodic material. Sharp, confident, laced with flows that showed Ycee was still a student of the craft, Dakun landed on Apple Music’s Top 100: Nigeria chart and stood as the clearest signal that the album’s rap moments were its heartbeat.
Even a lukewarm critical reception of Ycee vs. Zaheer couldn’t diminish what Dakun represented: a man who’d been through label drama, personal reinvention, and public scrutiny coming back with his bars fully intact.
5. Link Up ft. Reekado Banks
There’s a lineage of Nigerian party songs built on the architecture of ease; records that feel so natural they sound like they were discovered rather than written. Link Up is one of them. Ycee and Reekado Banks found a chemistry on this First Wave EP cut that felt genuinely joyful, two artists who seemed to be having as much fun making the music as their listeners would have dancing to it.
It’s one of those tracks that aged gracefully. Play it now and it still holds. Some records do that.
6. Don’t Need Bae
A flex record for the independent era, Don’t Need Bae caught Ycee in the sweet spot between street rapper and pop craftsman. It was a knowing wink at the culture, riding a wave of anti-relationship humor while disguising genuine emotional complexity in its grooves. The song spoke to a youth culture that was learning to turn loneliness into lifestyle.
It also showed Ycee’s range, that he could talk about matters of the heart with the same conviction he brought to street bangers.
7. MIDF (Money I Dey Find)
Released during one of the most disorienting years in recent memory, MIDF— Money I Dey Find— was exactly what the moment called for: honest, grounded, hustler’s gospel. This was a man putting on record the singular obsession that drives most of Lagos: the pursuit. The song connected because it was true, and because Ycee delivered it with the kind of lived-in authority that can’t be manufactured.
MIDF is the record that reminds you what Ycee sounds like when he’s speaking from the gut.
8. Bubbly ft. Falz
The First Wave EP contained multitudes, but perhaps none of its collaborations were as genuinely delightful as Bubbly with Falz. Two of Nigeria’s most lyrically conscious artists sharing a playground; the result was exactly as fizzy and fun as the title promised, with enough wit crackling underneath to reward repeat listens.
Falz brought his trademark satirical energy; Ycee matched it with playful bars and a hook that refused to leave your head. It’s the kind of song that makes you wish these two made an entire album together.
9. On a Low ft. Spinall
SPINALL’s production and Ycee’s unmistakable energy combined on On a Low to create something quietly devastating; a slower, more introspective cut that revealed yet another dimension of the artist. Where so much of Ycee’s catalog was built on kinetic energy and forward momentum, On a Low let him sit in stillness for a moment.
It proved that Ycee wasn’t just a rapper who could switch gears. He was an artist capable of genuine emotional register.
10. Jabole ft. Oxlade & DJ Spinall
By the time Jabole arrived in 2021, Oxlade was one of the most exciting voices in Afrobeats; all liquid vocals and raw tenderness. Ycee’s presence on the record served as both endorsement and reunion, a veteran showing up to co-sign the new generation while proving he belonged on the same canvas.
Jabole was the most recent reminder of what Ycee does uniquely well: his ability to step into any sonic environment and make it feel more complete. He doesn’t overwhelm features. He elevates them instead.
11. My Side
My Side arrived during the Ycee vs. Zaheer era and represented the more vulnerable register Ycee had been slowly allowing into his music. Where the early records were about posture and presence, My Side was about admission. An artist letting you see something real, and trusting that the audience would meet him there.
It didn’t get the mainstream traction of Juice or Jagaban, but it’s one of the clearest signs in the catalog that Ycee was genuinely evolving as a writer rather than just reconfiguring the same strengths.
12. Say Bye Bye ft. Eugy
Ycee and Eugy, the British-Ghanaian singer, shouldn’t have worked as well as they did on paper. But Say Bye Bye was the kind of cross-continental collaboration that made the case for how connected the African diaspora sound had become by the mid-2010s. The record was breezy and sun-soaked, Eugy’s melodic instincts pulling Ycee into a slightly softer space while Ycee kept just enough edge to stop it going too light.
So Where Is He?
The honest answer: still around, just quieter than the culture currently allows for. As recently as 2022, Ycee was releasing music; Azul ’22, Miss You with Tay Iwar, and in 2024, singles like Fear Love suggested the creative engine hadn’t stalled. In late 2025, he was teasing new music and stayed visible enough on social media to suggest the silence is intentional rather than final.
Perhaps he’s building something. Perhaps he’s between seasons. The music industry is littered with artists who faded at the exact moment they should have dominated, victims of label politics, timing, or the industry’s relentless appetite for the next new thing. Ycee has been through it all; Tinny Entertainment, Sony, independence, the grind of establishing ANBT from scratch, and he came out of every chapter with his artistry intact, if not his commercial momentum.
What we know is this: the catalog is there. The evidence is overwhelming. Ycee is not a punchline or a footnote. He is a genuine architect of modern Nigerian rap who happened to be doing it in an era when Afropop was consuming everything in its path.
We’re still waiting. And if the music above is any indication, the wait will be worth it.
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