“Dropped a banger by 12am and recorded 2 more!” Mayorkun posted just before noon, about eleven hours after “Home Training” went up on streaming services. On Apple Music, the EP that song opens is already listed with five tracks. Two of them have names. The other three are called Track 2, Track 3 and Track 4.
Long Live, The Mayor! is due on November 30, and he is still writing most of it.
What is public is the frame. “Home Training” sits first on the tracklist and “Kaluba,” the single he put out in late August and followed with a video at the end of September, sits last. The EP comes through Sony Music Entertainment West Africa under licence from Avante Digital Concepts, the same arrangement behind his singles since 2021, and it is his first project since the five-song Love.. For Free in October 2023.
It is also the third time Mayorkun has named a record after the job he gave himself. The Mayor of Lagos arrived in 2018, Back in Office followed in 2021, and now the crowd gets to shout the title back at him. Reviewing Back in Office, The NATIVE noted that “every year since his DMW unveiling, the singer has scored at least one smash hit,” and ended on a line that still describes how he moves: “He’s a pop star, and pop stars don’t really need great albums to remain on top.”
He sold this one half as hype and half as a joke. On October 21 he called it his “Biggest song yet.” On the morning before release he wrote that he had fallen “in love with music all over again,” and that evening he posted the teaser with “All that home training, just to forget everything tonight!” before adding, in Yoruba, “Ko s’home training laleyi o,” there is no home training tonight.
The song keeps that promise in about two and a half minutes. Most of it is refrain, circling back to “show you something after the show,” and the lines that stick are the cheeky ones: “Aquafina / Girl you flow like river,” and the woman he describes as “the good, the bad, the boujee.” In the video’s notes, Mayorkun says the song is about the kind of love that “doesn’t always follow the rules,” and that “sometimes, love is about knowing when to behave and when to leave all that home training at the door.”
The video, directed by Oluwaferanmi Olonade, known as Mor, and produced by David Soetan, landed at lunchtime with Dede in the lead. Precious “Dede” Ashiogwu finished as first runner-up on the tenth season of Big Brother Naija last year, and her fans got to it fast: one fan account’s post of the clip passed 900 likes inside its first hour.
So the single already has a muse and a fan army of its own. The EP has a date, a title that crowns him again, and three empty slots he says he is still recording for.
“Home Training” is out now. Listen here.