Heavensouls Has Yet to Meet a Genre He Can’t Awesomely Dismantle

Going Up is a profile series featuring artists we love who are on the verge of breaking through.

Chidi Obialo is an algorithmic playlist’s worst nightmare. As a musician and listener, he’s eclectic to a headspinning degree. Like The Matrix’s Neo reborn as an avid member of the obsessive Rate Your Music community, he wields expertise in everything from glitched-out electronic experimentalism to spiritual jazz to emo. From Zappa to Arca. MF Doom to doom metal. Afrobeat to breakbeat. “One thing I loved about getting into music was going in deep rabbit holes when it comes to genres and artists,” says Obialo, who records under the name Heavensouls. “So I just thought it would be cool if my discography was a rabbit hole too.” 

He’s well on his way: The Heavensouls Bandcamp page currently boasts more than 30 releases. And you never know exactly what you’re in for when you queue up one of his deconstructed odysseys. There’s purplish cloud rap that plays like a Lil B fever dream. Screwed-down happy hardcore. Ambient folk that showcases his bottomless singing voice. A 27-minute free-jazz visionquest. All of it is refreshingly strange—listening through his catalog is like eating handfuls of mystery jelly beans and being pleasantly surprised by the fucked-up flavor combinations.

This year, he’s leveled up even further. Working alongside like-minded producer Stickerbush as the duo Sidepeices, Obialo put 21st-century rap and R&B through a freaky, blippy funhouse filter on Darklight, which came out in January. Just a couple of months later, he released Heavensouls’ crowning achievement to date: Westside Trapped, an audacious record that seamlessly fuses the sounds of Fela Kuti-style Afrobeat, psych-rock, and sample-crazed hyperpop with Obialo’s own observations and struggles as an immigrant who moved from Nigeria to Texas when he was 7 years old. It’s an album that proudly harkens back to the past, but could only exist right now.

I connect with Obialo via video from his apartment outside of Houston, around Prairie View A&M University, where he’s wrapping up his sophomore year. He describes himself as a “broke college student in the middle of nowhere, with no car,” mostly living off the money he makes from all those self-released records on Bandcamp. “I’m studying fucking computer engineering,” he says with an eyeroll, adding that, if he’s able to sign a legit record deal soon, he’ll drop out and move to Brooklyn. 

This plan seems very possible. He’s already in touch with reputable indie labels like Ghostly International, and his next record, due this summer, will be a solo EP released with the underground UK radio platform NTS that Obialo describes as “soulful and groovy, with IDM elements.” When he’s not in class, he’s making music, constantly. He’s already starting to put together the next Sidepeices album, with another Heavensouls record to come after that. “It’s hard for me to stay stagnant musically because that shit makes me feel uncomfortable,” he shrugs. He dreams of signing to a label with a groundbreaking electronic-music pedigree, like XL Recordings, rather than a major. “I feel like there would be much more of a connection there than it would be with a label that has, like, fucking Bruno Mars,” he says. “They’d try to force me to popify my music, and that would sound kinda ass.”

Just like in his records, Obialo effortlessly mixes pathos and irreverence in conversation. Even when discussing serious topics—like how African culture is restricted and silenced around the world; or his appreciation of writer Frantz Fanon’s 1952 exploration of the colonized psyche, Black Skin, White Masks; or coming out as pansexual amid a conservative, suburban environment—a joke is never too far away. Rhapsodizing about the immaculate creativity of turn-of-the-century R&B, he notes, “Even Sisqo got a whole string quartet just to talk about thongs, bro!” He’s active in his local communist party branch and tabled at a recent No Kings protest… where an incredulous woman threw her can of Dr. Pepper at him and his comrades, much to Obialo’s amusement. His musical ambitions include collaborating with avant-garde trailblazers like Laurel Halo… and playing a Sidepeices set where the duo challenge a fan to beat them at the fighting game Tekken on stage. “If they lose, we would not play any more music—that would just be it,” he explains with a smile. If Obialo were an emoji, he would be the one that is laughing and crying at the same time.

His cultural obsessiveness goes beyond music. At a time when many of his Gen-Z peers struggle to make it through a full book or feature film, Obialo regularly dives into heady literature and art-house cinema. “I fucking love reading, bro,” he tells me. “That’s why I’m so jealous of writers. I’ll be trying to write something and I’ll be like, This might be good. Then I’ll read a Toni Morrison book and be like, Fuck!” He even values more humble literary forms, like music criticism, and is delighted to learn that I was the guy who wrote Pitchfork’s review of one of his father’s favorite albums: Lil Wayne’s 2010 rap-rock dud Rebirth.

At one point we veer off into movie chatter, and Obialo explains his love of offbeat, fish-out-of-water films like Lars Von Trier’s Dogville, Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. “They put one person in this environment where everybody’s unstable and gaslighting them, and then they have to find their way,” Obialo says. It’s an experience he can relate to as someone who crossed continents and was dropped into the American South in his youth, and then spent his adolescence moving from place to place—some nicer than others—in Texas, South Carolina, and Louisiana. (“They had a big demographic of them Confederate flaggers out there,” he says of one stint in southern Texas.) “It’s something not a lot of people talk about—the psychological impact of constantly being shifted out of different environments,” he says. “So when it’s explored in a surrealist, psychological way, it radiates a frequency in my brain, like, Hey, we’re on the same page.”

He follows up this incisive analysis with a profane, off-the-cuff summary of Von Trier’s 2014 erotic mindbender Nymphomaniac that I’m compelled to quote here in full. (Spoiler alert, I guess!) “The whole movie is this girl who’s getting mistreated—she becomes, like, a hoe, fucking up families and doing crazy shit,” he starts. “She’s telling everything to this guy that’s straight-up asexual, and at the end of the movie this nigga jacks off, and then she shoots him.” He’s cracking all the way up now. “Oh my fucking god, bro, that shit is garbage.”

Obialo’s musical omnivorousness is impressive in itself, a startling exhibition of technical feats. But his art goes deeper than geeked-out virtuosity. His discography doubles as a personal scrapbook that abstractly chronicles his emotions and adventures, from the exhilarating to the harrowing. “I didn’t know how to express myself through words, so I would make beats and songs,” he explains.

Around the time he recorded 2023’s Debut, he spent a month living in a Houston homeless shelter as his stepmom, who worked for years as a pilot for Southwest Airlines, was talking to realtors about finding a new place to stay. “I’m not gonna lie, the homeless shelter wasn’t that bad,” he says. “Everybody just kept to themselves.” The album is heady and insular, like a Floating Points DJ set heard through a thin wall. 

The following year, he peppered Jambalyah with recordings he took while traveling through America with his dad, who’s a truck driver. Obialo fondly remembers these unofficial bring-your-son-to-work trips, when he would play his Nintendo DS in a bunk bed in the cab of his dad’s rig as they carried goods from one place to another. These outings made him love truck stops, those blocky oases where people from every walk of life converge for rest and fried food. And there was that one day Obialo grabbed the truck’s aux and started playing the screamo band Pierce the Veil while yelling along directly into his dad’s ear, almost causing a crash. “Those were really good times,” Obialo says with a laugh.

Northside Trapped, which is alternately bleary and blaring, was inspired by being arrested in New York City a couple of years ago. After playing a small gig with friends, he was smoking a blunt while walking back to his hotel when he was questioned and then taken in. “It was some bullshit, bro,” he says, still annoyed. They put him in a holding cell for 24 hours—causing him to miss his flight home—and then let him go without explanation. He remembers one absurd moment in the police station when he overheard a quarrel between two fellow arrestees about Destiny’s Child, of all things. “It was a weird-ass argument,” he recalls.

If his previous records were like chapters documenting fleeting moments in his life, Westside Trapped, plays more like a full autobiography. Obialo conceptualized the album as an avenue for him to spread the Nigerian music and culture he grew up with, which is often suppressed, overlooked, or sanitized by the West, to a new generation both within and beyond that country’s borders. A mix of samples and live recordings, Westside Trapped weaves together the rhythms of Afrobeat and highlife alongside splintered drum solos and snippets of long-forgotten R&B hooks from the mid-2000s. There are also meticulous little meta touches embedded into the music, like a sample of Talking Heads, as a nod to that band’s love of African sounds. Or the inclusion of a small snippet of a Jpegmafia song because, as Obialo puts it, “People kept saying my music sounded like Jpegmafia—so I was like, Can Jpegmafia do this shit?” 

Obialo’s memories of his childhood in Nigeria are hazy and bittersweet. When he was a kid, his parents squabbled over the family’s future; Obialo’s father dreamed of raising his son in America to take advantage of its opportunities and abundance, but his mom wished to bring him up in Nigeria. They compromised by splitting up, with Obialo and his dad flying across the ocean, while his mother stayed behind. Obialo still keeps in contact with her. “I would send her Animal Collective albums, and she would listen to them,” he says.

Westside Trapped is steeped in this personal history, as well as the histories of so many brilliant African artists and musicians who weren’t able to achieve the global acclaim they deserved. Obialo reels off a few of these undervalued heroes: Ebo Taylor, Celestine Ukwu, Sweet Talks, Pat Thomas. The album peaks with the nine-minute epic “Shed a Tear for Me,” which begins with Obialo repeating the phrase “I can’t breathe” over a spare, syncopated groove before the song zigzags through Sonic Youth-style feedback, saintly synths chords, and a headbanging guitar solo that could fit on a classic Funkadelic record. “I wanted to make a song about the concept of stress and the fact that we are genuinely restricted,” he says, talking about the plight of so many Africans. “We’re held down by different factors when it comes to trying to send our art out and have people hear us, to the point where we can’t breathe. We can’t speak. We can’t share our voices.”

The record’s finale, “O Di Gbere,” also sprawls toward the nine-minute mark, but is more of an ambient meditation than a strident statement of purpose. Obialo created the song to serve as a sonic temple where he could find peace away from a judgemental society. “I wanted that song to be a safe space, because a lot of my parents are religious, and a lot of people around me don’t really fuck with that,” he says, referring to his pansexuality. “After all of this hate and madness that I feel, I wanted it to be some sort of heaven.” He pauses briefly, and I wonder if he’s worried the interview is getting too personal. But just as quickly, he’s back: “Damn, I thought I was gonna burp.”

Cementing its ties to Obialo’s roots, Westside Trapped features several of the producer’s young family members, who are also part of Nigeria’s diaspora, on vocals, saxophone, and percussion. He wants them to take their interests in music and art seriously, like he does, while also being able to have fun with it. After his dad’s generation left their homeland and worked blue-collar jobs so that their kids could manifest freer lives, Obialo wants to take advantage of that promise. “I like keeping a lot of my band members in the family,” he says, “because the younger generation does art as a hobby, but hopefully—hopefully—I’m the first one to actually make a career out of it. And I want to bring them with me.”