Y'akoto

“Y’akoto’s music is rich, vibrant and true – a heady mix of spirituality and sensuality that combines the sublime warmth of Afrobeats and other forms of west African pop music with the shimmering edge of modern dance music and contemporary R&B. An endlessly restless creative spirit, the singer and songwriter has lived her life on pop’s most luxuriously imaginative edge, with her honeyed, totalising voice tapping into a lineage of quietly powerful vocalists from Sade to SZA.

Now, Y’akoto steps confidently into a new musical world, her most effortlessly ingratiating guise yet, with a set of songs that tap into the musical underground of Accra, the place she now calls home, as well as her cosmopolitan, melting-pot upbringing. Channelling age-old musical tradition as well as the electric feeling of 2020s genre-bending pop, the Y’akoto of 2024 embodies, as her collaborator Juju Rogers says on one new song, “a wicked mix of book knowledge and that street education” – a life lived well and full, transmuted into abundant pop music.

Y’akoto was born Jennifer Yaa Akoto Kieck in Hamburg, Germany, to a political scientist mother and a celebrated Highlife musician father. That duality – a mixture of analytical and ineffable, left-brain and right-brain – is present in Y’akoto’s music to this day, which is led with the heart but contains a sharp, endlessly curious emotional outlook. Named for the day of the week she was born (Yaa, meaning Thursday, in line with traditional Ghanaian naming) as well as her paternal grandmother (Akoto), Y’akoto’s musical moniker exalts her heritage and her family history in the same way that her music does, acknowledging the legacy of the “kick ass women” in her family as well as Ghana’s culture and importance to her musical journey.

Growing up, Y’akoto’s father’s home studio became a playground. Recording on a small Casio keyboard, she would write her own songs or record audiobooks to music, finding ways to entertain herself as an only child. Her mother sent her to ballet class, and that, combined with the music her father introduced her to, gave her an early and innate sense of rhythm and musicality. “I was fascinated with my little keyboard – you know, when you’re a child and you have all these fantasies, so you make up stories,” she says. “My stories needed songs to go with them.”

Y’akoto’s celebration of her culture is important. She is a self-described eternal misfit – a mixed-race child growing up in Ghana, where she was pegged as an odd-one-out due to her lighter skin; a Black child in Germany, where she spent her teen years and was one of few non-white people at her school. The xenophobia Y’akoto experienced through her life, though, turned out to be significant animus in her artistic journey. What better place to be an odd-one-out, she thought, than standing on a stage, in front of a band? Music is one of the few cultures in the world that celebrates and champions difference – the perfect universe for a talented, determined young woman to make a home and a name for herself – and provided an instant respite from the darkness of her childhood, a place where her feelings were never denied, her expression was never dismissed, and she could carve out a space where other people who looked and felt like her could finally be seen. “The outsider thing really inspired me to become a musician – I got to finally sing about and talk about the things I wanted to talk about,” she says. “I knew when I got onstage and had something to say, nobody would tease me or bully me.”

At 13, Y’akoto started her first band – a project that already showed off her penchant for fusing multiple genres – and it quickly became a sensation thanks to her resplendent voice and obvious charisma. For the next few years, she toured and recorded, finding success in Europe and beyond. At 21, she signed her first record deal under her own name, and, while contending with the attendant stresses of going solo – working out how, as an artistic introvert, to exist in public without hiding within the safety of a band – began to map out her own distinct galaxy, channeling her musical DNA as well as the lessons she’d learned as a teenage working musician into something distinctively, defiantly Y’akoto.

Breaking through in Europe with her debut EP, Tamba, released on Warner Records, Y’akoto quickly made a name for herself as a pop songwriter on the edge of a new vanguard of Black renegades, suffusing her music with heart and a divine, distinctly feminine energy. Y’akoto continued to hone her status as a pop star on the rise, collaborating with artists across the musical spectrum on her first two albums, Babyblues and Moody Blues, before winning critical acclaim with the distinctive, concept-driven Mermaid Blues, an album inspired by artists through history who carried the same defiant, idiosyncratic flame that she does.

Y’akoto’s forthcoming body of work, “Part 4: The Witch produced in collaboration with Grammy-nominated Drake collaborator Nabeyin in Los Angeles as well as London based Producer Dan McDougall, pushes her artistry even further into pop’s centre. Across a suite of sleek, futuristic Afrobeat songs, Y’akoto sings about the tensions in romantic relationships, the alienation and power of immigrant children, and the bold, inherent strength of women the world over. These songs were greatly influenced by Y’akoto’s return to Ghana in 2018, and her desire to “experience how it feels to be an adult in Ghana.” “I always felt connected with my roots, and to be an artist to me means expansion. In Ghana, I love the culture and the language and the pace of the capital,” she says. Going out to clubs in Accra, Y’akoto would sit and listen to the city’s underground DJs for hours, watching revellers and feeling the thrum of the bass in her stomach; inspired, she decided to inject her new music with the aliveness of the city. “The sound of Accra really touched something inside of me – running around in West Africa really triggered this deep feeling that I needed to get back into the studio.”

Finding kinship in new collaborators – Nabeyin, as well as Top Dawg Entertainment’s REASON, Brazilian artist Rincon Sapiência, rapper JuJu Rogers– Y’akoto simultaneously creates a world that’s mysterious and heartening, her sublime voice clashing with and complementing the elemental spirit of her collaborators. With Nabeyin, Y’akoto has shaped a sound that expands the parameters of Afrobeats, finding a niche that’s hypnotic and deeply romantic, brimming with wisdom and wit. Now fully independent and making some of her strongest, most indelible music ever, it’s a remarkable new chapter in a life full of them.
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