‘It's not noise. It's a message': the misunderstood misfits of Nigeria's underground rock scene

The Guardian

4 days ago

In the violet hush of a late-night doom scroll, I stumbled across her: a woman clad in lacquered leather and glinting chains, legs laced in harnesses. She stood mid-growl, clutching the mic as if to throttle it, her silhouette framed by a red LED screen that read 'Rock Nights' along with the name of the artist: Clayrocksu.
Beneath the stage at Pop Landmark in Lagos, Nigeria, a sparse crowd of silver-studded misfits was filmed thrashing around in a trance. The performance provoked a small moral panic in the comments: cries of 'demonic' and fears that Clayrocksu was 'slipping into darkness'.
The darkness Clayrocksu and others move through isn't occult, though – it's obscurity. In the west, goth and emo subcultures offer outsiders a name, a tribe, but in Nigeria they barely exist. The industry here forgets itself every few decades, and since the rise of Afrobeat, and later Afrobeats, rock has been sealed off or paved over. But it's kept alive by DIY shows such as Clayrocksu's Rock Nights series, WhatsApp chats, shared gear, and today's small scene – bands such as LoveSick, ASingerMustDie and the Recurrence – is raw and defiant.
Long before Clayrocksu et al ever screamed into a mic, Nigerians were shaping rock to their own rhythm. Between 1967 and 1970, Nigeria fought a brutal civil war after the south-eastern region declared itself the Republic of Biafra. In the aftermath, the Hygrades, who lit up the 1970s with tracks like In the Jungle, came from the east along with the Funkees and the Doves – post–Biafran war kids with guitars, trying to turn trauma into sound. These early bands still leaned on the swagger of Hendrix and the snarl of Jagger, but it wasn't until Fela Kuti – fierce, lyrical, unmistakably ours – that Afro-rock began to speak in a Nigerian voice.
But more immediately palatable pop, dance and gospel came to fill the airwaves, while rock had no radio, no label push, no hype. Still, it lived on in the margins, and more recently fan-led WhatsApp groups such as Rockaz World and Rock Republic have kept the flame going, along with the now-defunct Naija School of Rock blog. Clayrocksu isn't just a musician and now a member of the Recording Academy in the US, whose members vote for the Grammys; she's also an ambassador for the scene who set up the collective Afrorockstars in 2024. It's a kind of Justice League for Lagos's indie rock scene, where artists band together, host shows, and keep the flame alive.
With her monthly Rock Nights series on hold due to a lack of funding, Clayrocksu has teamed up with Lagos venue Kevwe and Cam for a band showcase called Lagos Misfits Takeover. I head there to find what is left of Nigerian rock.
'I don't remember a time when I wasn't into rock,' Clayrocksu says before going on stage. As a kid, she played bootleg pop-rock CDs on her Walkman. Her dad was a rock head, too – less edgy metal, more Bon Jovi and Michael Bolton – but when Clayrocksu started covering his favourites, she finally got it. 'I can't explain it,' she says of her love of rock. 'The music called to me, and I want others to feel that, too.'
She's unfazed by the moral panic she unleashed. 'I don't pay it any mind, honestly,' she says. For the Afrorockstars community, 'rock is just part of life, same as their faith'. She pauses, fingers grazing the crucifix around her neck. 'Some of them wear crosses, too.'
She introduces me to LoveSick's frontman Korny, a 31-year-old, soft-spoken man with a bald head and a Jason Voorhees–style hockey mask clipped to his pants, his lucky charm. 'I bought it the night we won Battle of the Bands,' he says, referring to a Lagos event late last year, which was LoveSick's first ever live performance. 'I used my last cash to buy it from a vendor who said everything she sells is blessed. I wore it, we played and we won triple what I paid.'
He looks every bit the nerdy IT solutions guy, but that changes when he takes the mic and growls through Guiding, a track whose lyrics – 'I've got 5k [Naira, about £2.50] left in my bank account' – are about surviving Nigeria as a broke youth.
The sound at the venue is rough, but 'we can't wait for perfect sound like Afrobeats,' Korny shrugs. 'The show must go on.' His voice – guttural, sharp, sometimes screeching – feels scorched. 'I taught myself back in 2011,' he says. 'Just mimicking my favourites.' They were Korn's Jonathan Davis, Linkin Park's Chester Bennington, Asking Alexandria's Danny Worsnop. Now, he cycles through screams, growls and pig squeals. 'It's not noise,' he says. 'It's a voice. A message.'
Also playing at Kevwe and Cam is brother duo ASingerMustDie. 'Hope y'all are ready to die tonight,' one of them deadpans into the mic. The venue's walls are lined with portraits of legends like Oliver De Coque and Fela Kuti, watching over the night's rising acts, and ASingerMustDie's set feels distinctly Nigerian – rock as the vessel, but with a message rooted in lived experience. 'It's all about feelings, experiences, societal issues,' the brothers tell me. Their song Córazon, for instance, was born from a toxic love story and the fear that leaving would hurt more than staying.
Phones light up during LoveSick's set, and again for Clayrocksu, as fans look to prove they were here. Xavier, a fan of LoveSick, says he's been into rock for about 13 years: he first heard it on Need for Speed and Fifa, and it hit him like nothing else. 'Power chords and riffs break from traditional music patterns – they're chaotic, but beautiful,' he says. 'In a place as chaotic as Nigeria, rock helped me make sense of it all.'
For this crowd, it isn't just music, it's making space to feel seen in a country that doesn't reward difference. 'Even if you don't sing rock,' Clayrocksu tells me, 'you can still be one of the cool kids with us.'
ASingerMustDie's new EP Songs to Die For is released 25 August