Before the rest of the world had a vocabulary for what Afrobeats was, Tekno was already inside it. “Pana”, the song he released in 2016, was not a calculated hit. It was a shift in mood, a rolling groove with room to breathe in the spaces where other artists packed in more drums, more energy, more everything. Across dance floors from Lagos to Nairobi, the song moved a little differently from the high-energy anthems that had been dominating the previous decade. Tekno called it itutu, an old Yoruba word meaning cool, composure, calmness. That instinct, to pull back, to leave space, is the thread that runs through his entire catalogue, and it runs through Where Did Love Go?, his third full-length album, too.
What makes the album’s very existence worth understanding is the decade between its release and the peak that preceded it. In 2017, Tekno went public with an acid reflux condition that had begun attacking his vocal cords. He kept performing anyway, and that was the mistake. A show in Ghana pushed the inflammation past the point of recovery without intervention. He spent months visiting a doctor in the US who charged $1,600 per consultation and did nothing useful.
When he finally got a proper diagnosis, his doctor, Dr. Damani, told him surgery was the only way forward. The procedure lasted 12 hours and involved a magnet implant rather than stitching, which preserved his chances of singing again. For seven months after the operation, he could not make a sound. In a podcast with Afrobeats Intelligence, Tekno said he contemplated suicide during the recovery. The bookings had dried up, the hospital bills were mounting, and the voice that had built everything was gone. He recovered, but it took years before the career momentum returned.
By then, the genre he helped build had become global. Younger acts had moved in. Amapiano was reshaping how African popular music sounded. Tekno responded to none of it, which is the most striking thing about Where Did Love Go? not that he sounds unaware of the changes around him, but that he seems entirely comfortable ignoring them. The eight songs here are Afrobeats, Afropop, and dancehall fused together the same way he has always fused them, without gesture toward whatever is trending in 2026.
The opening track “Bamboo” sets that posture immediately. It is tropical in arrangement, with melodic bass, rolling percussion, and a warmth in the mix that feels like late afternoon; it eases you in rather than arriving with any great announcement. The second track, “Press Button”, shifts the pace. Where “Bamboo” drifts, “Press Button”, produced by Yung Willis, comes in with a dancehall bounce. A saxophone arrives early and carries the track’s early mood before Tekno slips into Pidgin, the lyrics tilting toward seduction in the plainest terms. It works because he underplays it.
“Adaeze”, the album’s center, is its most emotionally direct song. Produced by D’Meek and Justopac, it is about loving someone who has gone quiet on you, not left, not said anything definitive, just grown distant, and the particular frustration of that uncertainty. Tekno has called it the project’s emotional anchor, and on the record it earns the label. It sits in a traditionally arranged Afro groove that gives the anxiety in the lyrics enough room to register without the production amplifying it into melodrama.
“Matter” is the record’s argument in its shortest form: a self-produced mid-tempo track built around the idea that when you love someone properly, their problems become yours. The production is warm and uncluttered, and it moves less like a single engineered for radio than a song that knows what it wants to say and says it. The Afropop Worldwide review of this album put it plainly: the old roots of Juju and highlife have worked their way back into the arrangements here, quietly and without fanfare. You hear it most on “Matter”, the rhythm section carrying echoes of sounds that predate everything Tekno grew up on.
“Port Au Prins” is Where Did Love Go?‘s most committed love song, devoted to the point of geography, a man willing to cross whatever distance the title implies to get to the woman on his mind. “Wedding Day”, co-produced with Tino, shifts into something more celebratory and forward-looking, a vow set to music rather than paper. The progression from desire to devotion to commitment across the album’s middle tracks is not subtle, but it does not need to be.
“Gently” and the closing track “Avelay”, produced by Yung Willis, bring the record down to a place of ease. “Avelay” rests on the phrase “I dey available”, I am here, I am present, and makes availability its own kind of love language. It finishes the album softly, which is the right call. The record has been making the same argument from track one: that the most reliable expression of love is showing up, reliably, without spectacle.
The album’s one real limitation is its length. Eight songs in under 30 minutes means several of the better tracks barely have time to develop before they are over. The Afropop Worldwide review noted it straight: just when you settle into one song’s particular language, it ends, and you are onto the next. That is not the worst problem a record can have; leaving you wanting more is preferable to the opposite, but a couple of these tracks, “Gently” in particular, feel like they quit before they find their full shape.
None of that undermines what the album actually is: a clean, confident record by a man who has been through enough that he no longer needs to prove anything. Tekno has 2.5 billion streams, production credits on Davido’s “If”, Kizz Daniel’s “Buga”, and Swae Lee and Drake’s “Won’t Be Late”. Beyoncé called him for The Lion King: The Gift. Elton John played his music on Apple Music’s Rocket Hour. Billie Eilish once called him her favorite artist ever, in a Vanity Fair interview, and he is still most famous in Nigeria for a groove he made a decade ago. Where Did Love Go? does not resolve any of those contradictions between scale and recognition. It just adds eight more songs.