Halima’s Hero’s Journey to the Club and Back
The velvet-voiced club songwriter and producer on making her delectable debut album, 2025’s 'Sweet Tooth,' and what comes next.
The music industry can be dictated by the churn of the release schedule—an album drops after a roll-out and then it’s on to the next. It’s something we’ve talked a lot about here at Hearing Things, as music critics who have in the past felt obligated (or even forced) to listen to, process, and review albums as quickly as they drop. But release cycles are simply not how music exists in peoples’ lives; art doesn’t glean meaning from its drop date, our relationship to it evolves as we grow, classics tend to be classics forever, and all of us are certainly still listening to and discovering new music from one, two, 20, 50 years ago.
As true as this is for listeners, it can be that way for artists, too—a fact I discuss with Halima Edozie-Akinlade, the Nigerian British Brooklynite known mononymously as Halima, around the one-year anniversary of her 2025 debut album, Sweet Tooth. Though the 29-year-old singer, songwriter, and producer has been making music since she was a kid, releasing a whole album was an accomplishment she’d long wanted to achieve—a sort of odyssey she had to take. “It feels like no time has passed and also like a lifetime has passed,” she says over video chat, her speaking voice carrying the same warm lilt of her singing voice. “I feel like I actually got to live the project, and now I can look at it and see, in a strange way, its function in my life. You have your whole life to write your debut album, and realizing that’s the function of it—the end of the beginning.”
Sweet Tooth is a slow-burner for me, too—one that just gets better the more I’ve listened to it over the past year. It’s a foray through Halima’s most-loved genres, and a bit of a flex that she can nail them so frothily: UK garage with shiny cascading scales, midtempo heaters tinged with Afropop-inspired synths, alt-pop ballads thick with atmospheric chords and plugged-in folk guitar, humid 2 a.m. wining music, hyperpoppy R&B romance, sweltering hip-hop percussion, and more. They’re united by her gymnastic, velvety alto and detailed tales of love, sensuality, and yearning: “Am I your one baby?/Coz you’re my eau de vie/And I your one ìfé mi?/Tonight your one ìfé mi,” she mewls trilingually over the sweeping synths of “Eau de Vie.” And on the woozy album closer “Callum,” Halima paints a detailed portrait of her homie rolling joints pristine while she writes love songs: “If I fall off," she sings gingerly, both tentative and sure. “Could you find me, babe?”
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