Aside from the prominent Afrobeats stars, the album will feature Ghana’s Shatta Wale, South Africa’s Moonchild Sanelly and Busiswa, along with Jay-Z, Childish Gambino, and Kendrick Lamar, who produced the soundtrack for Marvel’s Black Panther. The 2018 release of that soundtrack, which featured emerging Gqom artists, was credited with putting a global spotlight on the South African music genre.
The album was released on July 19, 2019 and it will feature Nigerian acts like Wizkid, Tiwa Savage, Burna Boy, Mr. Eazi, Teknoand Yemi Alade.
Wizkid is featured on a song titled, ‘Brown Skin Girl,‘ alongside Beyonce’s first child, Blue Ivy Carter, Beyonce and Saint Jhn.Tiwa Savage and Mr. Eazi featuring independently on ‘Keys To The Kingdom
“There are a lot of people who listen to Beyonce, or people who might not listen to Beyonce that will get this album,” said Catherine Appert, an African music and hip hop scholar at Cornell University.
The Afrobeats sound is a club-friendly mix of West African rhythms, American hip hop and Jamaican dancehall and Caribbean soca that started in Lagos and Accra, Ghana and has captured the imagination of fans in major music hubs including London, Paris and New York. While the sound has been a hot club trend for the last three or four years a soundtrack curated by Beyoncé could be game changer.
“At this point, it’s definitely crossover time to the US mainstream,” said Ademola Ogundele, a veteran watcher of the Afrobeats movement since starting his Atlanta-based music platform, NotJustOk in 2006. “Beyoncé is really going to accelerate awareness about the Afrobeats sound.”
