MUSIC REVIEW: Modola ft. BhadBoi OML “Kupe” Came to Shake the Room — And the Room Stayed Shook

Forget the TikTok challenge for a second. Forget Funke Akindele doing the bottle thing on her Instagram. Forget the blogs copy-pasting the same three sentences about “vibrant Afropop energy.” Forget about the Music Charts, even though it’s the number 5 most-streamed song on Shazam top 200 charts, one number behind Johnny Drille, Ayra Starr & […]

Forget the TikTok challenge for a second. Forget Funke Akindele doing the bottle thing on her Instagram. Forget the blogs copy-pasting the same three sentences about “vibrant Afropop energy.” Forget about the Music Charts, even though it’s the number 5 most-streamed song on Shazam top 200 charts, one number behind Johnny Drille, Ayra Starr & Young Jonn “Colorado”. Forget the radio stations blasting it all over our ears and speakers.” Strip all of that away, and what you’re left with is a genuinely well-constructed piece of music that most people are enjoying for entirely the wrong reasons — and enjoying it correctly anyway.

That’s the quiet magic of Kupe.

Modola is not new to this, even if the mainstream is just catching up. The woman grew up in Milan, carried Lagos in her chest the whole time, came back, dropped New Light, and apparently decided that a six-track EP was just a warm-up. Kupe, her first single of 2026, produced by Oodun lands like someone who has been watching the room carefully and finally decided it was time to walk to the centre of it.

The production is the first thing that earns its keep. threading something interesting here — there’s a Soukous spine running underneath the whole track, that old Congolese guitar-and-rhythm school that made West Africa lose its mind before some of us were even born. But it’s not retro. It’s not nostalgia-bait. It’s more like muscle memory, the kind of groove your body recognises before your head does. The percussion is tight without being rigid, the synths sit back and let the rhythm breathe, and the whole thing moves with the unhurried confidence of someone who knows exactly how attractive they are.

Then Modola opens her mouth, and the track shifts into a different gear entirely.

“Wetin I no like na see finish this thing funny Gbena woju, Modola wa gbale sun nita Ase lo ma liga, liga liga li ja kupe Life na 50/50 jaye orita”

This is where the criticism has to be honest — and the truth is that these lines are doing more work than they’re getting credit for. The code-switching between Yoruba, pidgin and the invented phonetic bounce of liga liga li ja kupe is not random. Modola is building a texture, a sound identity that is completely her own. Nobody else is constructing syllables quite like this right now. And that closing line — life na 50/50, jaye orita, enjoy yourself at the crossroads — is a whole worldview compressed into eight words. People are chanting it on dancefloors without realising they’re nodding along to something genuinely philosophical.

The chorus, of course, is the thing everybody knows by now:

“As my body dey gbọn gbọn gbọn gbọn gbọn gbọn E dey make dem want to pull over My body la banging, la hot, la fresh, la smooth E dey give dem the carry over”

Yes, the gbọn gbọn gbọn repetition is shameless. No, it does not apologise for itself. And it shouldn’t. The word is an instrument here — it vibrates, it mimics the movement it’s describing, and the “pull over / carry over” rhyme sitting underneath it is the kind of bilingual punchline that sounds effortless precisely because someone worked very hard to make it so. You don’t clock it on the first listen. On the third listen you rewind it. That’s the mark of a properly written hook.

BhadBoi OML comes in and does what a good feature is supposed to do — not steal the room, not disappear into it, but change the temperature slightly. His delivery is more interior, more melodic, a counterweight to Modola’s wide-open energy. The two of them together have a chemistry that sounds unforced, which is rarer than it should be in a scene where collaborations are often just two artists standing next to each other on a track.

Now. The criticism — and there is real criticism here, because four stars is not five stars for a reason.

Kupe is almost too polished. Production is immaculate, and because of that immaculacy, the song never quite surprises you. It flows from the opening bar to the last note with the smoothness of something that has been sanded down to remove all rough edges — and sometimes rough edges are exactly what a song needs to lodge itself deeper than a TikTok cycle. There is a moment somewhere in the second half of this track where you feel a breakdown trying to happen, a shift wanting to come, and it never arrives. The song stays in its lane from start to finish, and the lane is excellent, but you occasionally want Modola to swerve.

She doesn’t. Not yet.

But here is what matters — Kupe is proof that Modola is operating with a clarity of vision that most artists spend entire careers searching for. She knows what she sounds like. She knows what she’s building. The confidence in this record is not performance. It’s not manufactured for the algorithm. It’s the confidence of someone who did the work quietly and is now, very calmly, letting the room figure it out.

The room is figuring it out. Loudly.