On a fateful Tuesday afternoon in Lagos’s bustling mainland suburbs, this writer was caught in the pitiful haze of Lagos traffic. Within the cacophony of sounds—from car horns to street hawkers, law-enforcement personnel and the generally nonstop motion of Lagos life—there were pockets of peace to be found in Wine and Honey, the latest project from Nigerian alt-folk musician Lodù.

The album is a definitive meeting point between heritage-driven folk, contemporary RnB and soul. It carries the warmth and ceremonial energy of traditional Yoruba music while simmering those influences into something soothing, cathartic and deeply immersive.

Anyone familiar with the owambe scene in Nigeria, especially within Yoruba communities, would be familiar with the upbeat indigenous funk surrounding these celebrations: talking drums conversing with bàtá or related percussion, bright horn sections, band-driven choruses, call-and-response singing and densely polyphonic arrangements. It is music crooned for movement, ceremony and communal participation.

In Lodù’s Wine and Honey, her music feels like a bridge towards such traditions. She merges indigenous folk with the outward musical character of owambe, then softens the entire palette through soul and RnB. The percussion retains its cultural pulse, but it billows alongside warmer harmonies, airy instrumentation and spatial production. The song possesses the scale of ceremonial music while maintaining an intimate feel.

The album opens with Lodù’s gentle declaration, “Welcome to the Lodù experience,” and that is exactly what the project eventually becomes: an immersive voyage through her reflections on love, marriage, devotion, longing and desire.

Framed largely through the perspective of a Yoruba bride, Wine and Honey moves through different emotional stages surrounding romance and matrimony. Its seven-part sequence becomes something close to a narrative arc, carrying the listener from anticipation into admiration, ceremony, devotion, separation and eventually the consuming heat of desire.

“Lolufe” establishes that anticipation, introducing the beloved and the emotional excitement surrounding him. “Olówó Orími” moves deeper into praise, elevating the husband through affectionate admiration. “Morountodun” arrives around the discovery and recognition of love, before the “egbe gen gen” interlude briefly shifts the project into the ceremonial atmosphere surrounding the traditional handover of a bride.

“Follow” returns the album to its romantic centre, exploring devotion and the surrender that accompanies intimacy. “ìfemi”, featuring Dotti the Deity, wanders into separation and longing. By “Fire,” love has reached its most combustible point, becoming something consuming, sensual and almost feverish.

The title itself takes inspiration from the Song of Solomon, where wine and honey become powerful metaphors for romantic intoxication and sweetness. Lodù sustains that imagery across the record. There is something intoxicating about its rhythmic movement, while its melodies, harmonies and tender storytelling provide the sweetness at its centre.

Musically, Wine and Honey begins with a soothing yet slightly aggressive horn-driven funk fusion that sets the broader theme for the album. From there, the record drifts between low and high tonal planes. Songs such as “Moróuntódù” and “ìfemi” settle into some of its more soulful stretches, while “Lolufe” and “Follow” contain pockets of higher-octane energy.

These tonal shifts reveal a mesh of Lodù’s artistic personas. There is the charged performer, capable of summoning the colour and movement of an owambe celebration, and there is the sombre vocalist who explores restraint, longing and silence like her tender disciples. That contrast in tension is where much of the album’s magic rests. The energy rises and recedes naturally, keeping the voyage immersive until its very last drift.

Another striking quality of the album is its warmth, sonority and resonance. Lodù’s vocals act as the melodic lead, cueing the instrumentation and supporting voices towards the central emotional objective of each recording.

The songs often feel spontaneous because of their improvisations, intentional pauses and recurring crescendo moments. These choices preserve something of the unpredictability associated with live folk performance, where a singer can stretch a phrase, leave a silence hanging in the air or allow an instrumental passage to temporarily take over before the full ensemble returns.
Lodù’s octaves particularly showcase their prowess across these moments. She is able to manoeuvre her voice across the instrumentation, drifting above densely layered arrangements without crowding them. Even when the percussion, horns and backing harmonies begin to swell, her voice remains distinct.

Here, her sense of artistic control becomes one of the project’s greatest strengths. There is considerable movement happening within several recordings, yet the listener rarely feels muddled by it. Lodù understands when her vocals should lead forcefully and when they should simply glide over the arrangement.

The supporting vocals are equally important. They frequently operate as communal responses to Lodù’s lead, drawing from the call-and-response structure embedded within Yoruba musical traditions. They enlarge the emotional scale of the songs. A private confession of affection can suddenly feel like something affirmed by a family, bridal party or entire gathering.

The lyricism also strengthens the album’s cultural grounding. Lodù moves comfortably between Yoruba and English, allowing the former to carry a considerable amount of the album’s emotional and conceptual weight. Yoruba exists here beyond ornamentation. It shapes song titles, vocal cadences, praise forms and the general worldview from which this romantic story is being told.

The beloved is praised through culturally recognisable forms of endearment. Love is tied to ceremony and community. Longing is expressed with tenderness, while desire eventually becomes the fiery conclusion of the project.

There is also something important about encountering an album like Wine and Honey within contemporary African pop music. Younger musicians continue to explore nexuses within their cultural hemispheres, returning to indigenous languages, rhythmic traditions and performance styles before pushing them through contemporary production systems.

For Lodù, heritage never feels like an aesthetic accessory attached to RnB and soul. The modern influences merely give her another vocabulary through which that foundation can travel. “Egbe Gen Gen” perhaps makes this clearest. It becomes a ceremonial bridge inside the narrative, briefly immersing the listener in the cultural processes surrounding the bride before the romantic storyline continues.

There are also moments when the project’s commitment to warmth and sonic continuity causes certain songs to bleed into one another. A few sharper production shifts could have further distinguished the individual identities of its quieter moments. Yet, that continuity also contributes to the album’s ceremonial character. Wine and Honey feels less concerned with manufacturing isolated singles than sustaining one emotional movement. It’s a very cohesive, apt and urgent body of work.

At the end of the listening, one would find that the album has travelled through anticipation, admiration, marriage, devotion, distance and desire. Its folk textures remain bohemian in heart, while the clarity of its melodies and production keeps the project accessible.
Wine and Honey eventually feels exactly like its title. It is soothing and intoxicating, but sweet at its centre. That sweetness finds itself in Lodù’s rich harmonies, expressive storytelling and compelling alt-folk fusions.

In the middle of Lagos traffic, it temporarily transformed noise into stillness, like the Biblical ‘miracle at Cana’ where water morphed into wine. Throughout that fateful stringent, stress-soaked afternoon, the music remained this writer’s salvè. Beyond that, it remained an accomplished exploration of how Yoruba heritage, romance, ceremony and contemporary soul can comfortably inhabit the same musical body. It sits at 9/10.