For someone barely a year into turning heads in Ghana, Kwartengg is strikingly uninterested in the things that usually come next. He isn’t chasing charts. He isn’t trying to crack a market or go viral in a territory. What he wants, the thing he keeps circling back to in conversation, the word he uses at the beginning and again near the end, is for someone to press play on one of his songs ten years from now and feel something immediate and involuntary. Like cool air after a long, humid day. “Still refreshing. Like, yo, this is still refreshing. That’s it. Like even years to come, I want people to listen to my song and still feel relief and have a connection with the soul when they hear it.” It’s a strange ambition for the industry he’s in, small and sensory in a way most artists aren’t trained to want. And it’s the kind of thing only he would say.

He’s a Kumasi boy through and through, and the origin story starts there, in JHS, around 14, writing music and dreaming of becoming the next Samini. “I was so inspired by Batman. I was like, soon I will also be like Batman,” he says, laughing. Batman was Samini Dagaati’s name before he rebranded, and to a teenager in Kumasi with music on his mind, he was proof that a Ghanaian boy could do something extraordinary with his voice. Beyond Samini, he grew up on Osibisa, not just the sound but the spirit behind it. Different people coming together, pushing Ghanaian culture somewhere it had never been, and that stuck with him. He wanted to replicate it. He and a group of friends once sat down in JHS and decided they would be the youngest artists to come off the airwaves.

That group never happened. But Kwartengg did.

The group dissolved the way most JHS dreams do, without a formal ending. But Kwartengg kept going, and he’s a full-time artist now with a sound nobody can quite put a name to, which, it turns out, is how he likes it.

Bring up genres and watch him sit with the question longer than you’d expect, not stalling, just unsure whether answering it would be doing himself a disservice. “I’m not a fan of boxes. I don’t like the idea of boxing a thing, it’s like a system that you’ve created around a certain kind of thing, it’s too institutionalized. I don’t enjoy stuff like that,” he says. The only reason he’ll choose a genre at all is logistical, and he finds the whole thing a little absurd. Distribution platforms need a genre to tick before they’ll put your music anywhere, so he had to pick something, but he prefers to call his style soul music.

And it isn’t just genres he refuses to be pinned down by. The sound he’s making now isn’t the sound he’ll always make, and he’s clear about that. “Art is life. And life is a continuous process. The more we move, the more we become aware of stuff, the more we want to be unaware of some stuff as well.” He doesn’t have an “I’ve arrived” mindset and doesn’t plan to develop one. “I might surprise myself. I don’t even know how I got to where I am right now. So I don’t know how I’ll get to wherever I’m going. This is just where I am right now. Tomorrow will also take care of itself,” he says.

For the past year, Kwartengg has been approaching his music like a prophecy. He’s been studying the confidence of certain prophets, the kind of people who make enormous declarations without a single piece of evidence, and decided that was the energy he wanted to bring into the music. “Out The Mud”, his latest song featuring M.anifest, is what that sounds like. “For you to say such stuff that you don’t have evidence to and come all out and say, yeah, this, this, this, you have to find a certain level of confidence in what you are doing to be able to do that. And I’ve started giving that approach to my music,” he says.

He’s careful, though, not to claim full credit for it. “It is not really my doing, I’ll be honest with you. My ego would let me know that, chale, I be that guy. But it’s not really my doing. It’s just a frequency. A frequency that I’m fortunate enough that most of the time, I catch the right ones. And I open myself up as a portal for these things to pass through from wherever they are, whichever realms they are, to our current realm.” He calls his body an instrument for his soul, and once the song was done, he kept it on repeat until it started making sense to him.

He won’t tell you what the song is about, and he’s not being coy about it. His connection to it is his own. Yours is yours, and he’d rather not get in the way of what it means to you. “If you ask me what ‘Out The Mud’ is about right now, there’s a thing that I would say it is about, but that is my personal connection with the song. But there is the thing that the song goes on to tell you, that is also your personal connection with the song. So I’m in the space where I don’t want to change your personal experience with the songs for you by telling you what I think the song is about,” he says.

If anything, the only part of the song he’ll claim is the first line. “The first line, that is the line I know I had 100% control over. The rest of the song, I don’t know how they came. And it makes sense. So it’s like a deeper conversation that my soul is having with me,” he says.

Home, for Kwartengg, isn’t a building or a destination. “Home can be a feeling. Home is when you are not really doing much, but everything is working. Like you are in sync with everything. Somebody can make you feel at home. A conversation can make you feel home. An aroma can make you feel at home.” Dance is home too. He loves to dance, not the kind with a name or a count, but the kind you do alone in your bathroom, where your body just goes where it wants. When he’s dancing, he says, he feels at ease, like it’s all that matters in that moment.

Kwartengg had written most of the song before he got to the studio. He sent what he had to Mike Millz On’Em, who produced the beat, and when Mike invited him to pull up in Accra, M.anifest was already there. Kwartengg had been a fan for years, following every record and every tweet, so being in the same room felt surreal. “It was like, herh, me and M Digidi.” They had the kind of conversation the song was already asking for, the deep kind, the kind that only works with certain people. M.anifest wrote his verse right there on the spot, and it came out full of quotables. “There and there, like we dey there naaa wey he write the thing wey plenty quotables inside like that.” Beyond the verse, he helped Kwartengg think through the bigger picture, structures, direction, things that are hard to put into words. “For what he brought on, it was marvelous. It was insane. And even beyond the music, God bless M.anifest.” He means it. When he grows up, he says, he wants to be like M.anifest.

He made the video himself, directed it, edited it, colour graded it. He learned filmmaking so he’d never be stuck waiting on anyone, and he frames it simply: he’s gathering more tools in his arsenal. He isn’t protective about any of it though. He learned filmmaking out of necessity, not ego. “It’s not to say that if I get somebody who is equally potential, even more potentially potential than me, I wouldn’t allow myself to have that person come on board.” If someone better at the colour grade or the edit shows up, he’ll step aside. Naa Norlley, who was a co-creative director on this project, is where that shows. The goal was never to do everything alone. It was to never be stuck waiting.

There’s a long-running belief in Ghanaian music that you have to relocate to Accra to be taken seriously, and Kwartengg isn’t particularly worried about it. The internet already solved that problem, he says. A song recorded in a Kumasi studio goes onto a distribution platform, lands on a playlist, gets picked up on TikTok, and before you’ve had time to think about it, someone in Atlanta or London or Tokyo is using it as a sound on their page. Discovery doesn’t work the way it used to, and he’s content to make music where he is and let the new pipeline carry it.

He welcomes the divided reactions. Some love the sound immediately, and others find it, in his own words, ugly. “When you are doing something really important and quite different, you don’t expect everybody to like it.” The strength of the reaction in either direction was confirmation enough. “I need those people around. I need them more to do that.” He lights up saying it.

He still wants what he wanted in JHS: for a 15-year-old, somewhere, a decade from now, to press play on his music and feel it immediately, not because they know his name or his story, but because the music got them first. Still refreshing. Refreshing soul music. He’s been chasing that since he was a teenager in Kumasi writing songs he had nowhere to put yet, and he’ll tell you himself that he’s not there yet, but he seems to like it that way.

Written by: Cyril Senason

Photography by: NWS Photos (@nws.photos_)