Tems Says Her Second Album Will Be Mellow, Melancholic R&B — and a 30-Minute Phone Freestyle Explains How She Works

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Most artists tease a new album with a trailer, a cryptic countdown or at least a title. Tems is doing it with a mood. In a cover interview with EE72, the Nigerian singer gave fans their first real description of her second album, the follow-up to 2024's Born in the Wild — and the picture she painted was of a record that flows rather than hits: more R&B-leaning, more melancholic, smooth and mellow, with a lo-fi softness to it. AllHipHop and DancehallMag, both writing up the interview this week, carried the same description, which tells you this wasn't an offhand line. It was the message.

No title. No release date. No tracklist games. Just a direction, stated plainly by an artist who has never seemed interested in manufacturing suspense. And honestly, the direction makes sense the moment you sit with her catalog.

A narrower lane, on purpose

Born in the Wild was a wide record — 18 tracks that moved across R&B and soul, flirted with rap, and pulled in guests including J. Cole. It played like an artist showing you the full map of what she could do. A second album that deliberately narrows the focus is a different kind of statement: less map, more depth. DancehallMag's write-up made the same observation, noting that a tighter, moodier lane cuts both ways — some listeners will welcome the focus, others will miss the sprawl.

We're in the "welcome it" camp, and here's why. Tems' voice has always done its most devastating work at low volume. The songs people carry with them aren't the ones where she's competing with the production; they're the ones where the production gets out of the way. A melancholic, lo-fi R&B record built around that strength isn't a retreat. It's an artist figuring out exactly where her power lives and deciding to live there for forty minutes.

It also fits where R&B itself is drifting. The genre's center of gravity has been moving toward the intimate and the unpolished for a while now — records that sound like they were made in a room, late, by someone feeling something specific. Tems describing her album in almost physical terms, like water moving, suggests she's chasing a feeling rather than a format. Those records age well.

The No. 1 that started as a voice memo

The interview's other revelation might be even better. Tems explained that she rarely writes lyrics down on paper at all. Songs start with the music, she freestyles over it, and the melodies and words arrive together, instinctively. It's a process she has used from her early breakthrough work through to her biggest recent hit.

That hit is Raindance, her collaboration with British rapper Dave, which reached No. 1 on the UK's Official Singles Chart in January and held the top spot for two weeks. According to her account in the interview, the song began when the team around the session handed her a microphone and she freestyled into her phone for about thirty minutes. The finished record was then pieced together from that single burst of recording.

Sit with that for a second. A song that sat on top of the UK chart — one of the most polished, deliberate-sounding records of her career — is essentially one half-hour of instinct, edited well. There's a lesson in there that goes beyond Tems: the distance between a voice memo and a No. 1 single is mostly trust. Trust that the first unguarded version of the idea is the truest one, and that your job is to protect it rather than sand it down.

It also reframes the new album news. An artist who works this way — no notebook, no labored rewrites, everything caught in the moment — describing her next record as melancholic and mellow probably isn't describing a production choice first. She's describing the headspace the songs came from. If the freestyles were coming out sadder and softer, the album was always going to sound like this. She just followed them.

What we still don't know

Plenty, to be clear. There is no title, no release date, no confirmed features and no single yet. Tems has also used her platform lately for more than music — the interview touched on Leading Vibe, the foundation she set up to support the next generation of women in music, including its London launch this summer — so the album will land in the middle of a bigger moment for her, not in a vacuum.

But anticipation doesn't always need a date attached. Sometimes a single paragraph in a magazine interview is enough to reset expectations for an entire album cycle: quieter, sadder, smoother, and made the same way a chart-topping single was — one voice, one phone, thirty unguarded minutes at a time. When the title and date finally do arrive, you'll find them on the Previously music hub alongside the rest of this week's releases. Until then, the mood is the announcement — and the mood sounds beautiful.