The bells arrive first. They ring through the opening bars of “Highness” with the insistent, slightly hurried pulse of a Celestial service getting underway — agogo cutting across a samba-drum shuffle, handclaps filling the gaps, the whole thing moving with the communal momentum of aladura worship. For eleven seconds, you would be forgiven for thinking S-Smart had made a praise record.
He hasn’t. “Highness” is about getting high — what it feels like, what it makes him do, and the point at which the pleasure starts collecting its debt. Only in the back half does he turn towards God, and by then he isn’t praising. He’s asking to be let out.
That gap between what the song sounds like and what it says is the record’s entire argument, and lead producer Latifat Abdulwahab (Teefah), working with co-producer Kobiowu Rasaq (RSQ), builds it deliberately.
Teefah’s instinct here is restraint. Rather than layering the track into something dense, she establishes the Celestial rhythmic language early and then refuses to abandon it. The bell figure holds its pattern throughout, unmoved by whatever else enters. The percussion stays forward in the mix. Nothing is buried, and nothing is added for its own sake. RSQ’s co-production reinforces the floor rather than complicating it.
The result is conceptually consistent rather than technically busy, which is the harder discipline. It also means the beat runs in a loop that mirrors the story S-Smart is telling: get high, act out, notice the damage, ask for help, repeat. The production is cyclical because the behaviour is.
S-Smart works with this rather than against it. His delivery is melodic and half-chanted, and the vocal sits inside the arrangement as another percussive layer instead of riding on top of it. On the hook — “Nítorí kí wọ́n lè lá èèyàn pa” — he chases the phrase rhythmically while the bells refuse to move for him, and the friction between a vocal that keeps shifting and a figure that won’t is where the record generates most of its tension. It is call-and-response in which only one party is listening.[gloss]
Sacred sound wrapped around secular appetite is not an unusual choice in Nigerian pop. It is close to the house style. Asake built a career on choral arrangements and Fuji percussion carrying lyrics about money, women and excess. Fuji itself began as Ramadan wake-up music and long ago made its peace with the nightclub. Seyi Vibez, Shallipopi and half the current Street-Pop wave are working the same seam.
So “Highness” is not doing something no one has done. What it does differently is narrower and more specific. Asake reaches for a generalised gospel-choral grandeur; Teefah reaches for one identifiable tradition — Celestial, bell-driven, and recognisable to anyone who has walked past a white-garment church on a Sunday morning. And where most of these records use the sacred palette as sheer texture, an ironic garnish over hedonism, S-Smart eventually cashes the reference in. The deliverance plea makes the arrangement retroactively literal. He isn’t borrowing church sound to sell a party record; he is standing in the church.
That’s a real distinction, and it’s the reason the irony resolves instead of just sitting there being clever. The church was inside the song from the beginning.
The writing is the weak link. “Highness” is not lyric-heavy, and the hook is a fair sample of the whole: [one sentence on whether the line earns its repetition — is the image sharp, or is it carried by the phrasing?]. There is a version of this record — one with two more specific images, one genuinely uncomfortable detail about what the high costs him — that would be considerably better. As it stands, the subject is stated more than it is explored. S-Smart gives us the situation; the beat has to supply the meaning.
You can call that atmosphere over storytelling and defend it on those terms. But it does mean the record leans almost entirely on Teefah’s concept, and a concept that strong deserves a lyricist willing to meet it.
A producer’s record, and a good one. Teefah has the sharpest idea on the track and the discipline to hold it across three minutes without over-decorating; RSQ keeps the floor steady beneath her. S-Smart is a capable enough presence to let the contradiction do the work, though he never quite writes his way up to it.
“Highness” sounds like the church before its protagonist has found his way back to it. Whether he means it or not is the question the record leaves open — and it’s a better record for not answering.
