There’s a certain tonal colour that has surfaced across Afrobeats in recent years. From Solidstar, to Kizz Daniel, to Peruzzi, the music has this hyperactive mesh of vintage Naija pop flows and modern production. It sounds cultural. It feels closer to home. And it definitely swells with a groove. This is the same candour that defines Dotman’s catalogue, including his most recent release dubbed, Hakuna Matata.

Across the sprawling project, Dotman’s strongest qualities are amplified: his distinctly Nigerian vocal inflections, his instinct for melody and his ability to turn everyday experiences into music that feels both intimate and communal.

For many reasons, Dotman excels on this 17-tracker album. However, beyond his singing talent, the crux of this trajectory lies in the mastermind of Victor Akolade Olowu, his manager popularly known as KoladeDominate. The radio personality, talent manager and Artist/Repertoire to Dotman served as the invincible compass stirring Dotman into his most comfortable artistic persona on a ready-to-blow basis. His influence can be felt in the architecture surrounding the music: the repertoire, pacing, emotional direction and preservation of the qualities that already make Dotman identifiable.

Victor’s imprint in Dotman’s career first starts with the talent-market sync that Dotman presently enjoys. Melding elements from the emerging emo-pop wave, with clubby genres like Trap, and Amapiano, while retaining Dotman’s ‘Nigerianness’ in his expressions is a formula that’s positioning the young chap’s sojourn for today’s booming Afrobeats market. That balance is central to the A&R vision behind Hakuna Matata. Dotman is allowed to explore contemporary textures while his vocal character, streetwise storytelling and indigenous expressions remain the adhesive holding the record together. Victor’s strongest decision here appears to be recognising what already works in Dotman’s artistry and building enough musical space around it to travel.

The music is mostly aspirational. It rings off like a memoir on the singer’s life; a straight-out-of-a-diary situation of sorts where the more convincing a story is, the more you can hear it in the music. This vulnerable, uplifting combo is not just a strategy, but a slice of Victor’s A&R playbook. Listeners can immerse themselves in the singer’s life and draw a sense of comfort in relating to those stories. Across songs touching on survival, love, family, pleasure and personal progress, the album keeps returning to Dotman himself. Victor’s direction helps these individual experiences function as parts of the same portrait, giving the project an emotional centre that listeners can easily recognise.

However, beyond Hakuna Matata’s didacticism, there’s also the musical plot. Most of Dotman’s tracks in the album are crafted as an invitation to dance, to purge. You can hear it in how the beat breathes, those subtle pockets of blank melodies where Dotman pauses for the groove to marinate. There is an intelligence to that restraint. Dotman knows when to withdraw his voice and allow the percussion, chords and basslines to carry the emotional momentum. Then, the code-switching, constantly expressing in Yoruba, Pidgin, and English, seducing the psyche of his audience with this very indigenous-facing tape. It widens his reach while keeping the emotional language rooted in the environments that shaped him. In A&R terms, this becomes part of the positioning; a recognisable voice presented through a musical vocabulary capable of travelling beyond its immediate cultural home.

Every other thing is just a sheer stroke of compositional mastery; from Dotman’s slow-burn progressions, to the ever-present tropical pop chords that sweep through each track, to the melismas that just make each melody stick. His vocal inflections become another instrument in the mix. He bends syllables, stretches phrases and occasionally lets a melodic run linger long enough to become a hook of its own. It is why songs like “Frenemies”, “Hakuna Matata”, “Duro”, “Awe”, “Shuga”, among others, spring as addictive dancey grooves.

Even when the subject matter is more altruistic and admonishing, the mood still gets you bobbing one’s feet and heads. That cathartic pace becomes one of the album’s most dependable tricks. The stories can carry emotional weight, yet the production keeps releasing that tension through rhythm. It’s a pristine quality of Dotman’s Afro pop groove that makes his catalogue stick out like a sore thumb. Victor’s A&R sensibility appears strongest in this preservation of Dotman’s melodic DNA across such a lengthy project.

One other interesting highlight is tracklisting and arrangement. The album opens with the emo-pop swooner “Pele”, and shuffles several high-octane and slow-burn moments to evoke a balanced feel. That sequencing gives the record its dramatic pulse. Songs like “Chop Life” and “Enu Gbe” push its aspirational energy forward, while the softer stretches allow Dotman’s emotionality to breathe before the album gathers momentum again. This dramatic release of tensions arrives at the end of the album, when the music has fully soaked in.

By the time “Mama”, “Duro”, “Frenemies” and the closing “Blessed” arrive across the final stretch, the record feels increasingly reflective, bringing its larger ideas around relationships, struggle and gratitude closer to the surface. It’s why after listening to Hakuna Matata, there’s no surprise if what one remembers the most is Dotman’s hypermelodiousness.

The entire album was designed for one to remember that, to remember him. That is perhaps Victor’s clearest achievement as an A&R on the project. The album contains several moods and production ideas, yet its strongest takeaway remains a clearly defined artist. Every detour eventually reinforces the identity at the centre of the music.

Ultimately, it is a classic project that extols its creators, one as witty as Victor. For an A&R, perhaps there is no greater success than helping an artist sound increasingly like himself. On Hakuna Matata, Dotman sounds unmistakably at home.