Six years ago, an Ancestry DNA test told Matt B something he had no language for yet: that the family history he’d grown up without a clear map to actually led somewhere specific: Nigeria. What began as a private discovery has since become a public undertaking, one album at a time. ALKEBULAN III: The Water Remembers closes the trilogy that started with ALKEBULAN (2023) and the Grammy-winning ALKEBULAN II (2024), and it does so with the confidence of an artiste who no longer needs to convince anyone he belongs to the story he’s telling. He has already been named, titled, and welcomed home in Owerri, twice over. What’s left is the harder work: turning that belonging into something you can actually sit with, track after track.

Recorded with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at Abbey Road and self-funded, The Water Remembers is Matt B’s most ambitious record by some distance. It’s also, thankfully, his most patient one.
“At the End of the Door” opens the album on kalimba and restraint rather than fanfare, Matt B’s Igbo delivered low and unhurried, like a man easing himself into a room. The Kabusa Oriental Choir arrives softly at first, then insistently, and by the song’s final stretch it’s clear they’re not a guest feature but the project’s compass.

“Nothing Dey Pa” trades that hush for swagger, and mostly earns it. Matt B’s declarations of resilience ride a groove thick enough to carry them, and Skales’ verse arrives at exactly the right moment to lift a song that could otherwise have coasted on good intentions alone.

Then comes “Iri Ji”, and the record finally lets itself have fun. Built on a Highlife pulse and Igbo proverbs about movement and purpose, it’s the album’s most infectious moment. Boy Spyce doesn’t so much guest on the track as claim a corner of it, urging listeners to seize the day with a nonchalance that suits the song’s celebratory spirit perfectly. “Chop your life / Drink palm wine / Cos you fit no find / Guarantee for later”, he croons. If The Water Remembers has a song destined for replay outside the context of the album, this is it.

“Overboard” is where the record earns its subtitle. Told through the perspective of captives who chose the Atlantic over continued bondage, it’s the album’s most unflinching track, and its most necessary. Matt B recalls old memory: “Ha gburu eze anyị ka anyị tiri ha egwu” [They killed our king while we sang and danced]. The Kabusa Oriental Choir doesn’t accompany this one so much as bear witness to it, and Matt B wisely lets his own voice recede into the arrangement rather than centre himself in a horror that was never really his story to narrate alone.

“My Mother’s Song” is The Water Remembers emotional anchor. Drawing on the documented history of a girl taken from Sierra Leone in the 1700s who carried only a lullaby across the ocean, the track pairs Matt B’s Igbo with Fatoumata Diawara’s Bambara in a way that feels less like collaboration than communion — two languages, two griefs, recognising each other across centuries and an ocean. It’s the strongest three minutes on the album. Faith and ambition come together on “The Passage”, with Camidoh’s hook supplying a warmth that Matt B’s own verses, weighed down by the pressure of achievement, don’t quite reach for themselves. It’s a good song rather than a great one, but it does useful work holding the album’s midsection together.

“Fertile Ground” reunites Matt B with the Kabusa Oriental Choir for a meditation on forced labour that manages to hold both dignity and exploitation in the same breath; captives who laugh as they work, fully aware of who profits from that labour. “Were ọchị were ọrụ, mmụọ nke ịdị n’otu” [Work as you laugh, that’s the spirit of unity], Matt B sings. It’s thoughtful, even though it shifts into a lighter Folk music.

“IGIRIGI” is the record’s most conventional Afrobeats offering, and it knows it. Goya Menor’s energy and the pulsing, percussion-heavy production make for an easy, replayable groove, even if it sits a little apart from the album’s larger narrative concerns. “Me I want to live my life/ I no send anybody give me space”, Matt B sings on this groovy bop. Sometimes a good groove is simply a good groove.

“Children of the Sun” turns from struggle to gratitude without ever feeling like a cheap pivot, thanks in large part to The Cavemen and a children’s choir, whose presence gives the song a communal feeling.
The title track closes both the album and the trilogy, narrated by water itself as an ancient witness to everything that happened along its currents. It’s the album’s most literal conceit and, remarkably, its most moving. Matt B and the choir do not sing about memory here so much as sound like they’re standing inside it.

What’s remarkable about this project is The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra threading through Highlife, Gospel, Hip-Hop and Afrobeats without the record ever losing its shape. Kabusa Oriental Choir, too, performs a similar function vocally, returning at every emotional hinge point until their presence feels like an ancestral throughline.

Worth noting, too, is Matt B’s Igbo itself, which is not always fluent in the way a native speaker’s would be. A more cautious record would have layered enough production over it to disguise the seams. But here is a man singing his way into a language rather than performing fluency he hasn’t earned. The stumbling is the evidence of the work.

That, more than any single song, is what The Water Remembers leaves behind. Not a finished homecoming, but proof that Matt B has stopped asking whether he belongs to this story he’s telling and started asking what he owes it. Six years, three albums, and two ceremonies in Owerri later, the DNA test that started all this has long since stopped being the point. A name was given back to him; what he does with it now is no longer a matter of ancestry but of authorship. It sits at 8.0