Every Nigerian knows how much weight a small phrase can carry. No wahala. We move. I dey alright. Said one way, they are simple statements of fact. Said another, they are the verbal equivalent of brushing the dust off your trousers after a fall nobody else saw: an admission that something went wrong, folded neatly into a refusal to dwell on it.

So a song called “No Worries” begins with a question already attached to it. Which kind of no worries is this?

Eriko NWA and Nina Shezz could have answered with a straightforward party record, all brightness and no subtext. What I find more interesting is that the production keeps both readings alive. The song sounds relaxed, but the relaxation feels practised, like something the singers have decided on rather than simply arrived at.

Much of that tone comes from the production team. Sir KenAyo, the Nigerian producer Ayodeji Kehinde, shares the studio production credit with Jayclassic, and Kehinde also appears among the song’s composers alongside Eric NWA Ogalagu and Mary Osato Idehen, with Gideon Agbidu Amiseh credited for lyrics. I mention the composer credit because it changes how the production should be heard. Kehinde is not just dressing someone else’s finished song. He had a hand in what the song is.

What he and Jayclassic built is a record that finds its footing almost immediately and then declines to wander. The percussion moves without pushing. The melodic elements cushion the vocals rather than crowding them, and the bass carries weight without picking a fight with either singer. Plenty is happening in the instrumental, yet very little of it asks for your attention.

In the current Afropop economy, that is close to a statement of principle. So much is now built for the clip: the bass entrance engineered for a dance challenge, the odd drum fill designed to be looped, the vocal effect that exists mainly to be noticed in fifteen seconds of scrolling. “No Worries” doesn’t seem interested in any of it. It repeats itself instead, circling back to the same pocket again and again, until the repetition starts to sound like the song’s argument. The groove says what the title says: don’t fuss, carry on.

The two vocalists keep that circling from going stale. Eriko NWA and Nina Shezz inhabit the beat differently, one sitting low in the groove while the other lifts the same melodic territory into a brighter shade, and the producers are wise enough to let that difference do the work. The instrumental doesn’t reorganise itself every time the voice changes. It holds still and lets the contrast between the singers act as a kind of arrangement.

I admire that discipline. I also think it’s where the record comes up short.

A song about saying you’re fine needs a moment where you’re not sure you are. That is the drama the title promises, and the production never quite stages it. By the final stretch I knew exactly where the record lived and how it would behave, and it behaved exactly that way. What I wanted was one passage where the floor gave a little: the drums pulled out from under a single voice, the bass gone long enough to be missed. Not a gimmick, just enough doubt that the groove’s return would land as relief instead of routine. Without it, the reassurance has nothing to reassure us about.

To be fair to the producers, this is the kind of flaw only a well-made record can have. Nothing here is vain. No sound arrives just to show off its maker’s software. Parts overlap cleanly, the singers have room to breathe, and the whole thing holds together.

How much of that belongs to Kehinde specifically is impossible to say from the outside. Two producers share the credit, and without session notes, pinning a particular drum pattern or arrangement choice on either of them would be invention. What can be heard is the shared result: a team confident enough to leave space, and two singers who sound as though they belong on the same record rather than pasted onto it.

Production at its best is a sequence of small refusals: not adding the extra layer, not marking every transition, not reminding the listener who is behind the desk. On “No Worries”, Kehinde shows he can make those refusals. The harder skill, deliberately breaking what he has built so that it means more when it is restored, is one this record never asks him to use.

It’s a comfortable song. On a record called “No Worries”, I would have liked to feel some of the worry first.