Mara at 160 BPM: Lagos Producer Azzi on the Beat Makes a Debut That Refuses to Let You Breathe

Azzi on the Beat's Mara Gram is seventeen tracks of relentless Lagos carnival energy — acrobatic, sample-heavy, and genuinely difficult to categorize. Worth the disorientation.

Waris Rasheed grew up in Bariga, one of Lagos's dense working-class neighbourhoods, and started training as a traditional dancer at five in a free after-school arts academy. By 22 he's a producer who makes beats live on stage while dancing and doing acrobatics — which tells you something important about how to receive Mara Gram: this is music built for a body in motion, not a listening session on the couch. Mara is the genre — fast, sample-heavy dance music that grew out of Lagos carnivals and neighbourhood parties, with tempos that hit 160 BPM. If you don't know what 160 BPM feels like, it's roughly the pace of a sprint, and Azzi on the Beat sustains something close to that energy across all seventeen tracks. The opening track Police Way announces the approach immediately: sirens, clattering drums, and a second rhythm barging in before the first has finished. The album doesn't apologize for this. The range of samples is the most interesting thing here. Baggy Dance Shoot Sound pulls from 90s Euro-rave synths while a booming Lagos voiceover anchors the track geographically. Allah Create weaves south Asian-style chants through racing percussion. The self-titled Azzi on the Beat — probably the clearest distillation of his method — stacks playful vocal samples and insistent loops until the beats leave almost no room to breathe. His breakout track Mr Barry already demonstrated he could build a moment; Mara Gram is the argument that the moment wasn't a fluke. The honest friction point is the runtime. Seventeen tracks of unrelenting 160 BPM material is a lot to ask in a single sitting, and around the midpoint the album's deliberate refusal to vary its energy level starts to feel less like hypnotic discipline and more like stamina test. This is probably a correct artistic choice — mara is party music, it's supposed to wear you out — but it means Mara Gram works better as a source for individual tracks than as a front-to-back listen for anyone outside the genre. What's genuinely compelling is how the sample sourcing makes the music feel both hyper-local and cosmopolitan simultaneously. The Lagos voiceovers and the neighbourhood party DNA are unmistakable, but the Euro-rave, south Asian, and African reference points sitting inside 160 BPM percussion create something that doesn't map cleanly onto Afrobeats or Amapiano or any of the more internationally legible African pop genres. Azzi on the Beat isn't making music for export. He's making mara, and inviting you into it. He plays Nyege Nyege festival in Uganda on 19–22 November, which is the right context — a festival known for platforming exactly this kind of genre-resistant African club and street music. If you can catch him live, that's probably the more accurate version of what this music is trying to do. The album is a document; the stage show, apparently complete with acrobatics, is the thing.