As last year ground to a halt, and music critics and fans of Afropop, in their usual fashion, began to take stock of the year, by way of tweets and essays and vociferous debates, a rare consensus emerged: the genre was in a state of flux; old, hackneyed sounds were giving way to more experimental, emergent ones. Many pundits also predicted a straightforward, sunny future for the genre in the new year. The experimental sounds spawned in 2024, they argued, would catalyze a kind of renaissance for Afropop, and once again,…
