The two objects that define the Middle Passage are a door and a body of water. Matt B has built his third and final ALKEBULAN album around both. It opens with “At the End of the Door”, which is not a metaphor: he stood at the Door of No Return at Elmina Castle in Ghana before he made it. It closes with the title track, in which a deep, processed male voice recites a poem in the character of the ocean, recalling the people who rose from it and returned to it. A record about one man searching for where he came from ends by handing the microphone to the only witness that was there the whole time. That is a genuinely clever piece of structural thinking, and it holds the record together.
Matthew David Benson grew up in Chicago singing in church with his two older brothers, with whom he formed a family group called TriEnd as a teenager. His career has taken an unusual route. He built an early audience in Asia, where a single called “Colour Blind” went viral in China. He made a trap-soul record called Eden in 2021 that put him on the Billboard charts and earned a Grammy nomination in 2022 for “Gimme Love”, a collaboration with the Ugandan star Eddy Kenzo. Then came ALKEBULAN in 2023 and ALKEBULAN II a year later, the second of which won Best Global Music Album at the 2025 Grammys. That win also handed the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, an institution 79 years old at the time, its first Grammy. An Afrobeats record did that.
The trilogy started with a question rather than a concept. He took an AncestryDNA test in 2019, and it told him he was majority Nigerian, which he has said plainly was not enough for him. After the Grammy, the testing came back with something more specific: a traceable bloodline to the Igbo people of Owerri, in Imo State. In June 2026, he recorded with the orchestra at Abbey Road over two days, then flew to West Africa with his wife and manager Angela V. Benson for ten days.
In Ghana they went to the Assin Manso Slave River, where captives were washed before the march to the coast, and took part in a blessing ceremony. In Nigeria he was given the Igbo name Ikechukwu, two chieftaincy titles, and something harder to arrange: relatives, in person, for the first time.
The music that came out of this is closer to a suite than a set of songs. Transitions run into one another, orchestral passages carry you between tracks, and very little of it resolves in the way pop is supposed to. “Nothing Dey Pa”, with Skales, is the first properly rhythmic thing, Pidgin and swaggering faith over Afrobeat shakers. “Iri Ji” brings highlife guitar and Boy Spyce’s high register into something close to a party.
“Overboard” is the album’s darkest passage, sung in Igbo as something between chant and incantation, with the Kabusa Oriental Choir massing behind him. “My Mother’s Song” pairs Matt B with Fatoumata Diawara, who sings her part in Bambara, and the two languages sitting in one prayer is more affecting than any amount of orchestration. “Igirigi”, with Goya Menor, is the most immediate track here, amapiano-adjacent and built to travel.
The choir is the album’s real weapon. Kabusa Oriental Choir do things across these arrangements that the Royal Philharmonic, for all its scale, cannot: call-and-response, ululation, the specific weight of massed baritones. When both are working at once, as on “Fertile Ground” and “Children of the Sun”, the record earns its ambition. It also occasionally drowns in it. At times, the orchestra, percussion, full choir, and lead vocal arrive together, and the mix can’t keep them all in focus. And Matt B’s Igbo is imperfect. His phrasing gives him away in places.
I would argue that is the most honest thing on the album. He is singing in a language his family had removed from them by force, learned in adulthood, four centuries late. A pronunciation that betrays the effort is not a flaw in a record about severance. It is the subject, audible.
The harder question is the apparatus. This is an album, a short film, a feature documentary, a docuseries, and a rollout tied to a genealogy company in what has become a multi-billion-dollar industry. Sincerity and content strategy aren’t incompatible, but they aren’t the same thing, and the scale of the packaging occasionally threatens to speak louder than the songs. It does not quite manage it. The music is too committed, and the ending too well judged. Matt B went looking for his name. The water gave it back.