It is worth remembering what Mr Eazi did last time he put real weight behind a record. The Evil Genius, in 2023, was recorded across Ouidah, Cotonou, Kigali, Accra, Kokrobite, Lagos, London, Los Angeles and New York over two years. He commissioned sixteen original artworks, one for every track, from visual artists he met while travelling, representing eight African countries, and then hung them in galleries in Accra and at Somerset House during the 1-54 art fair. The songs dealt with grief, betrayal, loneliness and depression. It was the most elaborate thing anyone in Afrobeats had attempted, and the fair criticism of it was that it stayed mid-tempo and never quite lifted off.
“Comfort” is the opposite proposition in every respect. It was made during a stay in London. It is produced by one person, Ragee, who has recently handled Davido’s “Unavailable” and two of Ayra Starr’s singles. It has no concept attached, no accompanying exhibition and no act structure. It is a love song that ends before you have settled into it.
That reads like a complaint, and it is not. After a record about mourning, a man is entitled to make something light, and Mr Eazi has always been better at ease than at intensity anyway. The Banku Music he built his name on, that Ghana-Nigeria hybrid he worked out as an engineering student in Kumasi, was never about depth of feeling. It was about a particular kind of unhurried confidence, and this is a clean example of it.
The title has a small joke that most coverage has stepped past. Comfort is a common given name in both Ghana and Nigeria. The song is about a woman, and it is also addressed to one, and the double meaning sits there without being pointed at, which is the correct way to do it.
Ragee’s production does the heavy lifting. The track turns on a bass synthesiser line that keeps resolving and restarting, with the percussion left deliberately uncluttered, and it has the bounce that Mr Eazi’s best singles always had and his album tracks sometimes lacked. He sings it the way he sings everything, slightly behind the beat, more murmur than performance.
The reason to care, though, is MOLIY. The Ghanaian-American singer has had an extraordinary 18 months on the back of the “Shake It to the Max” remix with Skillibeng and Shenseea, which sat at the top of Billboard‘s US Afrobeats chart for 22 consecutive weeks, and she brings something to this that Eazi cannot. Her delivery is sweeter and more elastic than his, and she lifts the second half of the song simply by arriving. As a result, there is a slight imbalance. On his own single, Eazi occasionally sounds like the host rather than the main guest.
The real limitation is length. At under two and a half minutes, the track establishes a very good groove, gives MOLIY one pass at it, and stops. Another verse, or even another 30 seconds of the outro, and this would be a genuine summer record rather than a pleasant one. As it stands, it is a well-made, generous, slight thing from an artist who has made bigger statements and will presumably make them again.