T.I Blaze has been navigating the slippery slope of hope and expectation since his breakout with “Sometimes” in 2021. That song’s viral success, and its subsequent remix featuring Olamide, seemed to promise a meteoric rise for the young artist. While its mournful delivery established him as a special voice in street-pop, subsequent projects — El Major and Dangerous Wavy Baby — didn’t succeed at sustaining the same momentum. As quickly as the hype grew, it wavered since his follow-ups, though fairly competent, didn’t quite hit the same emotional nerve, and the streetpop lane he occupied started to feel too competitive for him to keep up.  But Shakur, his latest EP, is his return to form; it’s Blaze stepping back into the frame, reminding us why he mattered in the first place.

T.I Blaze’s gift lies in his ability to make emotionally rich music, to distill the chaos of everyday survival into sweet melodies, to make pain not just palatable but hauntingly resonant. The young act has always been a cartographer of struggle, mapping the emotional terrain of hustlers, dreamers, and survivors in Nigeria’s unforgiving socioeconomic landscape. With “Beamer,” one of the deep cuts on Shakur, he validates the singularity of his voice and vision. Produced by the ingenious Beat Murderer, this track’s deliberate, minimalist cadence counterbalances the emotional intensity of Blaze’s vocal delivery. The beat’s laconic quality is expertly calibrated to resonate with the song’s nuanced, emo-inflected sensibilities. It is a record that profoundly aligns with the existential imperatives of the hustler’s paradigm, articulately capturing the dialectical tensions between frustration and resilience, anxiety and determination, and self-doubt and optimism. “Beamer” hints at a promising resurgence that will hopefully continue to soar.