Jan 26 2026
By Emmanuel Esomnofu
In Lagos, rhythm is difficult to escape. It comes from the car beside you in traffic, from speakers outside a neighbourhood shop, from church rehearsals, street corners, clubs and the live bands that still give Nigerian popular music its physical pulse. For a young musician, learning rhythm in such an environment is rarely an entirely academic exercise. You absorb it by listening, playing and being around people who make music. That background helps explain an interesting feature of Joshua Ehindero’s development as a musician. Better known as Joshmusic, he has moved through several skills, drummer, songwriter, producer and live musician, without entirely leaving one behind for another. His progression is less a story of abandoning the drums for the computer than of bringing the instincts of a drummer into production.
That distinction matters. There are plenty of producers who understand how to assemble a beat. Joshmusic’s development suggests a musician more interested in what happens when that beat
has to carry an actual performer. His career began independently in 2017, during a period when he was writing songs, producing and collaborating with other musicians in Nigeria. Like many emerging Nigerian producers, his early work was built through practice rather than a neatly defined professional route or education. The studio became a place to learn by doing: trying arrangements, working with singers and discovering how an idea behaves once other musicians enter the picture.
The drummer in him has remained audible. He did not treat rhythm as something that exists separately from melody, Joshmusic tends to approach production through movement. His work is concerned with how a vocalist sits inside an instrumental, when an arrangement should become fuller and, perhaps more importantly, when it should leave space. That instinct can be heard in his work with Sirlammz. On “Lifestyle,” released in 2022, Joshmusic is credited as co-producer and co-writer. The record belongs comfortably within the broad territory of contemporary Nigerian popular music, but its appeal is not simply its rhythmic accessibility. There is a quieter quality to the musical setting, allowing the song’s subject which are desire, ambition and the distance between one’s present circumstances and imagined future to remain central.
That is a Nigerian story that is familiar. The ambition expressed in contemporary Nigerian music is often inseparable from the realities that surround it. The same city that produces songs about money, movement and success also produces the frustrations that make those aspirations necessary in the first place. “Lifestyle” works within that contradiction instead of trying to resolve it.
Joshmusic’s contribution is interesting because he does not appear determined to make the production announce itself at every opportunity. The instrumental gives the song more than enough space and room to breathe. It is a useful quality in a producer, although it also reveals something about where his artistic development currently sits: his instinct is often to support the song rather than impose a completely separate sonic identity upon it. That approach becomes more revealing when placed beside “Hard Body Youngin,” Sirlammz’s collaboration with Kelly Living Large.
The 2024 record moves into a harder rap territory, built around survival, ambition and the performance of having overcome difficult circumstances. The song’s strongest writing is found in its specific memories of hardship rather than its more familiar declarations of wealth and success. Joshmusic’s production responds to that difference. The instrumental moves between softer and heavier textures, allowing the voices to occupy different emotional spaces in the listener’s ear. His production also makes use of restraint. Instead of constantly filling the arrangement, he allows certain sections to fall back around the vocals. The effect is particularly useful when the song moves from boastful declarations to memories of poverty, family struggle and survival. This is where Joshmusic’s musical background becomes significant.
A drummer has to understand space. Too much activity can destroy a groove just as easily as too little. The drummer’s job is not simply to hit something on every available beat; it is to understand what the rest of the band needs at that particular moment. That same principle
appears to inform Joshmusic’s production choices. His strongest moments often come not from adding another element, but from recognising that an existing element needs room.
There is, however, a trade-off. The restraint that makes his production effective can also prevent some records from developing a more unmistakable sonic signature. “Hard Body Youngin,” for instance, creates movement largely through texture and changes in space rather than through dramatic structural transformation. The production understands the performers, but it does not always push the song into unfamiliar territory or sound to be new or unique.
That is both a strength and a limitation. Joshmusic is showing an increasingly confident understanding of how to serve a record, but the next stage of his development may require him to become more assertive about what the record should sound like because he made it. That question is how much should a producer serve the song, and how much should the producer leave a personal fingerprint on it? is particularly interesting in Joshmusic’s case because of his background outside the studio. From 2021, he worked with the Chocolate City Music live band, developing his experience as a professional drummer while performing alongside established Nigerian artists. Live performance requires a different kind of musical intelligence from studio production. A recording can be edited, rearranged and revisited. A stage cannot. A drummer has to respond to the singer, the other musicians and the audience in real time.
Joshmusic’s appearance as part of the band at Young Jonn Live in Abuja in October 2024 offered a visible example of this side of his musicianship. His role was not simply that of a musician occupying a position in the background. Subsequent coverage focused specifically on his performance, drawing attention to the drummer’s contribution to the show. That distinction is worth making because the modern Afrobeats ecosystem can sometimes place overwhelming emphasis on the recorded track. Yet Nigerian music has a strong live tradition, and translating a highly produced record onto a stage demands musicians who understand both worlds. Joshmusic increasingly belongs to both and the studio has taught him how to construct a track. The stage has taught him how a track behaves when human beings have to perform it.
The two experiences appear to be feeding each other and his work with artists such as Sirlammz, Young Jonn, Blaqbonez, Portable,Candy Bleakz, OdumoduBlack, Zlatan and Lil Kesh has also placed him in different musical settings. But the interesting part of these associations is not the list of names itself. It is what working across different artists can teach a developing producer about adaptability. A producer who works only within one sound can become very good at reproducing that sound. A musician moving between different artists has to make different decisions: whose voice should dominate, how much rhythmic space a particular performer needs, when an arrangement should become sparse and when it should become expansive. Joshmusic’s career has given him repeated opportunities to make those decisions.
There is also something distinctly Nigerian about the way his career has developed. It is not a straight line from formal training to studio production to major releases. It has moved through live performance, collaborations, independent work, studio sessions and professional band environments. That kind of musical apprenticeship is common within Nigeria’s creative economy, where musicians often have to occupy several roles before one particular identity
begins to take shape. For Joshmusic, that identity currently seems to be forming around the meeting point of rhythm and production. His drummer’s ear gives him an understanding of groove. His songwriting gives him an awareness of the importance of narrative and melody. His production work gives him control over the final arrangement. None of these roles completely explains him on its own.
Together, they make more sense. That is particularly apparent when comparing “Lifestyle” with “Hard Body Youngin.” They are not identical records, nor should they be. The former allows more room for reflection; the latter operates with greater weight and rhythmic aggression. Yet both reveal a producer who pays attention to the relationship between the vocal performance and the instrumental around it. There is still room for that approach to become more distinctive. Joshmusic is not yet an artist whose production can be identified from a few seconds of sound in the way that the most established producers often can, think Don Jazzy, Young Jonn, Pheelz, P Prime. His strongest quality at this stage may instead be his responsiveness: he listens to the demands of the song and adjusts the production around them.
For an emerging producer, that is not an insignificant foundation. The danger is that adaptability can become invisibility. If the producer is always accommodating the artist, the producer’s own personality can disappear inside the work. Joshmusic’s next artistic challenge, then, may be to retain the musical sensitivity that makes his arrangements work while becoming increasingly willing to leave a stronger signature on them.
His move into further professional production work with ZTTW from 2025 comes at an interesting point in that development. He is no longer only the drummer who produces on the side, nor simply a producer who happens to play drums. The two identities are beginning to overlap.His subsequent connection with the UK adds another dimension. Working between Nigerian and British musical environments creates the possibility of encountering different musicians, audiences and approaches to production while carrying with him the musical instincts developed in Nigeria.
The important question is what he does with that contrast. It would be easy to reduce Joshmusic’s story to a familiar narrative about an African musician taking Nigerian music to a wider audience. That would miss the more interesting part. His development is really about what happens when a musician trained by live rhythm begins to think increasingly like a producer.
The evidence so far is still a work in progress. There are records where the production is deliberately restrained and records where its personality could be pushed further. There are moments where his instinct for space gives a song clarity, and others where a more adventurous arrangement might have made the work more distinctive. But those tensions are precisely what make an emerging producer worth listening to.
Joshmusic is developing in the space between the drummer’s instinct and the producer’s control. The Lagos street, the live stage and the studio have each supplied part of that vocabulary. What remains to be heard is how far he can take it.
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