“We wanted to try and experiment a bit more with Afrobeats on this project…people think about Nonso Amadi and they think about like R&B music and Nigerian R&B artists. But with this project, we’re able to show people that, like, there’s a lot more that he can actually do if he wanted to. And this was an opportunity, in that instance, to say, ‘Okay, you want to go deeper? You want to go darker? How about we make the music move you a little bit more while doing that, you know?’”

The project began with a simple motif: water. Though Amadi initially tried to write about love and other familiar themes, the imagery of cleansing and release came most naturally. “Thematically speaking, we wanted to use the water as like representation of washing away certain feelings, emotions, grief, sorrows, all those things.” Those feelings manifest vividly on the opening track “Mmiri” (the Igbo word for water), his most culturally infused song yet and the first to feature lyrics in his native Igbo. Beneath the track’s rhythmic pulse lies a reckoning with identity and criticism. “…a lot of Nigerian artists, we find a lot of our critics are Nigerian for some reason, and we’ve had to deal with that tussle where we love Nigeria and we love our country and we love our people, but like, there is, like, certain things that we have to navigate around in terms of how people just say whatever online, on socials.”