ZAYA

Lagos raised her.
The world sings along.

“I make music for the hour when the city exhales — when the sun is low, the drums are warm, and everybody is somebody.”

Zaya Odion grew up between Surulere and her grandmother’s highlife records. She started singing in church, learned production on a borrowed laptop, and pressed her first EP, First Light, from a two-room studio in Yaba.

Two albums and an EP later, the formula hasn’t changed — it has only grown louder. Log drums and live percussion under melodies that cross oceans: Ember & Honey carried “No Wahala” from Lagos dancefloors to festival main stages in London, Paris and New York. Her new album, Golden Hour in Lagos, is the homecoming — twelve songs recorded where it all began.

Off stage, ZAYA runs the First Light Fund, putting studio time and instruments into the hands of young women producers across West Africa.

“A generational voice — ZAYA doesn’t chase the wave, she is the weather.”

Afrobeat Weekly — Album Review

“The rare live act who can silence an arena and set it on fire in the same song.”

The Culture Review — Live Review