Mr Eazi has spent this month on TikTok asking for a million videos to “Comfort,” his duet with MOLIY, with new music promised once the count got there. The song he kept dancing to between those posts was somebody else’s. “Banike (Don Julio),” from singer Kya Lami with producer De Confident DJ and singer Thembiie Dee, came out today, November 13, with a Mr Eazi verse in the middle of it.
He started filming himself mouthing that verse on November 6, in a bedroom, on a tree-lined path, in a marble hallway, captioning one “Thank me later I’ve blessed someone with a priceless mr eazi verse” and, two days later on a train, “Kya Lami has carry me Dey go with amapiano!!”
Kya Lami had been pushing it herself. On November 6, the day he started, he shared her studio clip on X, in which she stands in a wood-panelled booth in white headphones, reading her lines off a phone, with “Wait For The Final Song” written across the top. His caption: “She bad gaaaaan!!!!!! Na to find the song destroy am.”
The final song takes its time. De Confident DJ opens on soft pads and a shaker, and a man’s “Come on” at the 17-second mark lets the log drum in under Kya Lami’s “Don Julio” hook. The section after it turns into call-and-response, with low “Heh!” ad-libs punched right on the beat. Mr Eazi comes in for the second verse at about 1:25, pulling the hook into his own lines and coming back twice to the same three: “Make nobody stress me oh / I dey on settings / And I still want more.” Then the drums drop out for a long stretch of synth swells and echoing vocal chops, and a spoken male voice, soaked in delay, carries it to the end. The visualizer puts a glass of dark liquor and a gold “1942” on the table, in case anyone missed which tequila the title means.
Mr Eazi has been here before. “Patek,” with Mozambique’s DJ Tárico and Ghana’s Joey B, came out in September 2022, “Werser” followed in January 2023, and that May he released Chop Life, Vol. 1: Mzansi Chronicles, 14 tracks named for South Africa. Kya Lami has one earlier single under her own name on Deezer, “Zikude” from March 2024.
This time the amapiano record is hers, and emPawa Africa, the company he founded, is putting it out.