N4T: The Voice, The Vision, The Party Starter

“N4T is that part in a party where the lights are low, babes are whining on their friends, the G's them are dancing, you're hearing flipping, ‘Did You See What I Done’ in the motive?”

Energy cannot be created or destroyed, but it seems under the sound of N4t’s voice it can be summoned. To view and hear his artistry is to be inspired to move. I ask him to describe his artistry. “N4T is the party star,” he tells me, voice tumbling into cadence with equal parts conviction and grin. “I saw the scene looking all sad, distraught. I said, nah, we need to dance, we need to enjoy it still.” 

Photography by @ptrckjsr

Often, the conversation around dancing, parties, and enjoyment is frivolous. It’s passed off as a fad and an invaluable recreation for the young. I think that’s lazy. We live in such precarious times, where conversations around identity and migration are pertinent, especially in the Black British community. As children of immigrants, our connection to culture is a somewhat fossilised version passed down to us through our parents and grandparents. The key components are language, music, and food. Considering music is a valid form of connection to our respective Motherlands, how could the communal gatherings, movement, and engagement with it ever be unimportant? 

July 2025 marked the release of his self-declared “album of life,” GHANAMUSTGO. I’d describe this project as a catalyst. It is indeed riddled with energisers, but more significantly, N4T has crafted a project that is a conversation starter. It takes its name from a phrase freighted with exile and prejudice, flipping it into an anthem of reclamation. “Instead of Ghana Must Go as in be exiled, Ghana must go up. Ghana must excel. Ghana must go into rooms they’ve never been before.”

Photography by @kendrafilmz

From the first listen of the project, I have always been curious about the journey leading up to this point. What were his experiences? The conversations he was privy to growing up? Why this medium? 

The journey started with poetry, putting words and rhymes together. By 2022, he was releasing music, though he’s blunt about those early attempts: “some dead EP.” But failure, in his telling, is just another layer of study. He took 2023 off entirely, a year devoted to “becoming a student of the game.” That meant new flows, new genres, new ears. When he lost all his music files in 2024, he didn’t curse fate. “It was a blessing in disguise. The songs I made after were better quality. It pushed me harder.” From that crucible came “TINGATINGATALES,” a track that lifted him into wider recognition and laid the foundations of a network of producers, videographers, and peers who saw him differently.

But what N4T saw in return was absence. The release of ‘EVERYBODY HATES N4T’ on his 2024 EP ‘ADHD TV’ revealed to him the demand for African-influenced sounds in underground music. He saw shows where there were barely any black people. He observed that the diaspora sounds that did exist in the scene were mostly Nigerian. He reckoned with that absence, stating “we need music where the diaspora can see themselves in this.”.

Photography by hklivingg

That mission crystallised in Ghana Must Go. The title, in its provocation with his Ghanaian-Jamaican heritage, revealed a sonic journey from London to Accra. It’s London's abrasive basslines with the energy of dancehall and reggae, giving way to warmer Ghanaian textures, not forgetting the samples lifted from his childhood. Thirty-five of them, by his count, none arbitrary. 

I was curious to know why he opened with ‘I DONT WANNA HEAR ABOUT AFRICA.’ A snippet lifted from one of the many diaspora wars on Twitter’s spaces. Such strong words to open an album with. “They don't want to hear about African music!” he exclaims. He recalls being in the Space while Americans made dismissive remarks about the UK and African music scenes, and he saw it as a reflection of a broader attitude: many listeners seemed uninterested in hearing and respecting African influences.

Photography by @kendrafilmz

Placing that clip at the start of the tape was his tongue-in-cheek way of responding, signalling, “This is how you feel? Well, here’s what I’m doing for us.” Throughout the album, N4T intentionally alienates and erodes that sentiment by exploring sounds and influences that warmly resonate with the Black British audience, culminating in a more overtly African finale with the title track GHANAMUSTGO. The structure is a pointed declaration that Africa’s influence on music is here, and you couldn’t ignore it if you tried.

Diasporic identity, in N4T’s work, is never static. It is contested ground, a push-and-pull between

London and Ghana, Jamaican roots and British realities, the tug of a homeland both familiar and strange. His features mirror this multiplicity: Ciel, his Jamaican sparring partner in the studio, CSUFF2R, a Nigerian artist and TENDERO, a Ghanaian-Zimbabwean voice essential for an album reclaiming Ghanaian space. Together, they embody the diasporic conversation the project stages.

Photography by @kendrafilmz

What I enjoy about GHANAMUSTGO, as our most current depiction of N4T’s artistry, is that it shows he’s happy to work within contradiction. Joy and critique, community and isolation, dance and introspection. His music resists a single reading because it isn’t built for one. “Man can’t just party and then say that’s my whole existence as a human, as a Black person,” he says. I think this was such a crucial thing to say. As a consumer, it’s comforting to know there is conscious creation that facilitates conscious listening.

In Supermalt on the Stairs, he opens with something deceptively simple: “Sorry, I haven’t seen my cousin in years.” A line that slips between nostalgia and resignation, intertwining personal memory with broader social realities. The song's title evokes images of youth congregating on staircases during family gatherings, sipping Supermalt, which is a beverage emblematic of Afro-Caribbean communities in the UK. “I feel like it's the representation thing, because it's so authentic, people can relate toI’m talking about, t not seeing my cousin in a year… also in that song, I was talking about my auntie going crazy and my cousin's doing their GCSEs, everyone is going through everything, I feel like art should be, like, reflective of the times”

Photography by @riotvisulas_

Through a series of personal anecdotes, N4T openly highlights how life paths diverge due to economic pressures, welfare cuts, and unequal opportunities. He speaks to how divergence is not merely personal but is shaped by systemic forces that influence access to resources, mobility, and social cohesion. This song shows his ability to underscore the importance of personal narratives and societal contexts in the ongoing discourse on diaspora and identity. We can only attribute this to his songwriting, which reads as clear, melodic, and articulate.

Across his album, more personal and political blur together. The post-COVID fatigue, the tension of identity for a “real London boy” back in Ghana. He maps it all with a diaristic tenderness. “I wanted to arrive in Ghana and then leave Ghana by learning about it and also being changed in it,” he says. Each song becomes a chapter: Castaway acts as the turning point as he is talking “to Africa itself,” while GHANAMUSTGO confronts disillusionment with politics and power. “Man knows colonialism has mashed you up,” he says, “but fam, we need to stand on our own and not let these lot use us.”

Still, he finds a “healthy medium,” drawing from a sentiment hereditary to the lineage of Afrobeats. The contradiction becomes balanced, as he points out “ man are going through real things back there… so man can’t just glamorise it.”  Life can hurt and still sound good. 

Photography by @tookbyaaron

Over the summer, I had the chance to watch N4T perform at TWSTDFEST and HDAY. I wondered what that was like for him. “Making the music or being in your room, that’s one thing. But then you get in that crowd, and they’re singing go, go, ga, ga, ga, ga or black girl pop star,  it’s mad.” Performance transforms his songs. “We’re very performative… man’s turned Sasha Fierce on the stage,” he laughs, noting the theatricality of African performance culture: “Africans are very camp, so man has to get campy with it.” It’s undeniable that the room lights up with energy when N4T performs; every bit of effort he gives the crowd, they return the energy right back.

Beyond performance, N4T’s vision extends to depth and legacy. He speaks on furthering the perception of Ghanaian and Black British music on the world stage. “We are more than just a young Azonto, we are real people,” he says, conscious of the history and meaning threaded through the music. “It’s hard for people to humanise a lot of the Black experience… they might listen and think, oh, drugs are cool… but fam, man are really dying behind this.” 

He imagines himself as a pioneer, musically and socially, leaving a mark that stretches beyond him: running community centres, creating foundations, making “life-changing music” Even in imagining his future self, he envisions quiet impact: “When man’s sixty, man just live on a farm… take money dash a charity..."