Halima’s Hero’s Journey to the Club and Back

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?”

Meanwhile, the club bops “Eleven Eleven” and Lagos-inspired “Cocoa Body” hit the dancefloors of the best parties (including Club Cocoa, the queer POC/African diasporic dance night Halima throws in New York). But my favorites at the time of this writing, subject to change, are “Omoge,” which contrasts her sweetly low voice with a glimmer of a minimal synth melody, and the breathy, triple-timed “Feel About It,” which makes it pretty obvious why Halima was chosen to perform “One in a Million” at an Aaliyah tribute in Brooklyn this summer. 

Looking back, Halima says, making Sweet Tooth was less about a “constructed project” and more about living through the moment in which she made it. “There’s such a pressure for your debut to be like, ‘This is exactly who I am. This is my story. This is what I have to say,” she muses. “I think there was such a focus on, like, arriving, and being done. I realized that it was my experience of becoming only after I’d gone through that full cycle. I thought I was creating this hero's journey through my body of work—but then ended up living the hero’s journey.”

Growing up in Lagos and London with a single mom, Halima was always creatively minded; she got out her teenage angst in a punk band while studying playwriting and drama in school. She imagined she’d keep to theater and maybe major in anthropology—at least until she was 17, when she attended a five-week course at Berklee College of Music in Boston, where everyone “lived and breathed music.” Shifting her focus, she applied to NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Music for college, where she graduated in 2019 and has now come full circle, teaching songwriting and production classes there as an adjunct professor as she stakes out her own artistic path. 

Halima poured years’ worth of life experience into Sweet Tooth, and says that a year since its release, she feels like she has more room to breathe. “I was trying to figure out how to navigate my world in the microcosm of music and art at large, and it became a matter of weaving the fabric of this story of the last five years together,” she explains. “When I was finishing everything, it was like this race against time to create this world that actually is just very honest, to recount a documentation of my life. Now, I feel a lot less precious about it.”

Take “Onyx,” a mesmerizing, sped-up R&B track Halima released in August which serves as a coda to Sweet Tooth. It’s a heartbreak song that scans a bit like a 21st-century inverse of ’90s bass princess INOJ’s “Love You Down,” and sounds like the break-up postscript to the romance she tracked on her debut. In the last year, she’s been writing and producing for other artists, which helped her realize that she makes music best outside of the “fragmented process” of the industry. “Onyx,” she says, was made “in solitude, because that's how I know how to create—and why I create. I needed to express this emotion, and so the best way I knew how was to go sit down and produce the whole thing.”

With her debut out of the way, she’s creating her next project with more intention than abandon, even using a calendar to ensure she makes time for inspiration and creative prompts. Her regimented approach this go-round might just be written in the stars. “I’m a Capricorn rising,” she says, clocking the earth sign’s work ethic. ”It’s sexier to say, ‘Oh, I just had this concept come to me,’ because you’re protecting the magic of it. But the reality, like with anything else, requires commitment and discipline. There’s no shortcut.”

Halima will discuss Sweet Tooth tonight, September 19, at Silence Please in New York City. Tickets are free, RSVP here.