Spectreview: Lady Donli – Enjoy Your Life

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Nigerian neo-soul artist Lady Donli stuns with the depth of creativity displayed on her debut album, Enjoy Your Life.

If you were one of the lucky few who heard Zainab Donli’s brief introduction to the world, 2016’s Wallflower, you might be perplexed upon encountering the Hausa words and talking drum patterns of Enjoy Your Life’s opening track “Zaman Lafiya.” It’s a track that openly declares Donli’s commitment to bringing her Nigerian heritage into her mix of neo-soul and hip-hop, and that commitment is deftly, confidently executed throughout her debut album. Donli gleefully bounds back and forth between Baduisms (“With The Kindness”) and breezy Rap&B (“FLAVA”), peppering the tracklist with traditional West African instrumentation in uncontrived ways that lend a special lightness to her songs. The depth of creativity here is remarkable, and the fact that some tracks that wear this West African influence more obviously than others keeps the proceedings constantly fresh. The serpentine vocal melodies winding around the polyrhythms of “Suffer Suffer,” the staccato, Afrobeat keyboard lines on the superb “Cash,” the shekere and stippled organ grounding the pop chorus on “Boomerang” : there’s a wealth of inventive touches all throughout Enjoy Your Life, especially when they’re sandwiched between more standard but certainly well-done offerings like the trap-lite “Take Me Home” and the midnight balladry of “Trouble” (yet even these manage to sneak in inklings of palmwine guitar and shaker). This push/pull between trend and tradition is brilliantly represented on “Confident / Feeling Cool,” as two entirely different songs, the rubbery bass and hand claps of the former and the trap clicks of the latter, are tied together by their mirrored lyrics, both simple expressions of appearance-based self-assurance in a crowd. Overall, Enjoy Your Life is a fantastic stylistic turn for an up-and-coming that showcases a well of potential: Donli claims, “I’m just getting started” on closer “Bite The Dust,” and considering how smartly she’s written and arranged this album, we’re definitely taking her word for it.

Recommended for lighting incense.