The Lazarus Project ft. Laz

On this episode of Underground Unreleased, Wuchi sits down with Afrofusion’s next big story, Laz, fresh off signing to Wande Coal’s Black Diamond Collective. We recorded this whole conversation once, lost it to a botched platform, and brought it back from the dead.

But since the guest's name is Lazarus, we leaned all the way into it (00:00). Laz breaks down the 20 seconds of silence on "Patience" that had me convinced it was a listener test (03:08), before taking us all the way back to a childhood split between Sierra Leone and Nigeria in a house full of Brenda Fassie and Bonnie M, where the same parents who filled it with music became the first people to try to shut it down (06:00).

We trace the lyric books and golden-age Naija rap that shaped his ear through the uni years and his first recorded song (15:30), the six years he spent as a ₦60K-a-month spa manager before running to Lagos on a ticket a friend paid for (23:45), and the random writers' camp that turned into Wande Coal himself asking "Where is Laz?" (41:00). He gets candid on what signing to Black Diamond actually looks like and why melody is expensive (48:00), the real stories behind "Body Language" and "Patience," which weren't pulled from one relationship (51:00), and whether Afrobeats is really dead (1:00:00).

We close with raw, no-PR reviews of submissions from LeMon, MJ Papi, Biola, and MarellaXVL (1:04:00), plus one last word for anyone still grinding: don't give up (1:18:00). And much more.

Follow Laz: Instagram / X / TikTok: @_itzlaz Stream Laz's "Body Language" EP: Spotify - Apple Music - Follow Underground Unreleased: Instagram / X / TikTok / YouTube: @unreleasedng Artists: send your music for review to unreleasedng@