I’ve started putting together The Wax Museum’s 100 Best Albums of 2026, an annual exercise in assigning numerical order to a hundred records I love. And while there’s a certain amount of arbitrariness to these things (is my 37th favorite album really better than my 42nd?), I take the top of the list seriously. Those first few spots are the albums I want to look back on five or ten years from now and feel like I got right.
And as things stand, my Album of the Year is westside trapped by heavensouls.
It was looking like a pretty comfortable choice, too. Then, earlier this month, this 20-year-old producer I’d never even heard of before 2026 went and released another album’s worth of music that’s every bit as good. Two masterpieces in seven months. What the hell is going on here?
I first wrote about westside trapped back in July, describing it as a sprawling, sample-heavy collision of Afrobeat, jazz history, and digital-age production. Four months later, I’ve only grown more convinced that Nigerian-born, Houston-based producer Chidi Obialo made something extraordinary here.
The record is a deeply personal love letter to Nigeria, one that draws heavily from the country’s rich musical history and filters it through experimental hip-hop, electronic manipulation, and freewheeling jazz.
Earlier this month, I celebrated 50 years of Fela Kuti’s Zombie in The Weekender, and you can hear that record’s DNA all over westside trapped. Fela’s protest music was politically furious and still made people dance their asses off, and heavensouls carries that spirit forward. The interlocking percussion, the horns, the infectious grooves, the righteous anger. It’s all there, reassembled by a kid who grew up with the history of recorded music and the internet at his fingertips.
The results are frequently jaw-dropping. “creek ala” erupts into a gorgeous West African groove, “playing around wit a flip” is a masterclass in rhythmic invention, and the nine-minute “shed a tear for me” remains one of my favorite pieces of music released this year. It’s a furious, emotionally exhausting composition that sounds perpetually on the verge of flying apart.
I figured westside trapped would be heavensouls’ defining statement of 2026. A record that announces a major new talent, gives the music nerds something to obsess over, and keeps the rest of us occupied for months.
But he wasn’t finished.
On October 7, heavensouls released “cantu” of the sower, an EP in name only, with six tracks stretching across nearly 44 minutes. And holy guacamole, it might actually be better than westside trapped. Mercifully for my year-end rankings, it’s technically an EP.
Where westside trapped draws from Nigeria’s musical history, cantu is more abstract. IDM, glitch, free jazz, orchestral strings, frantic percussion, electronic bleeps and bloops, and all manner of strange noises collide in a dense, cacophonous collage. It’s overwhelming, disorienting, and somehow one of the most beautiful things I’ve heard all year.
It reminds me of Parannoul’s maximalist, blown-out approach to rock. Both bury you under so many layers of noise that you wonder how any of it could possibly be pleasurable, only to arrive somewhere genuinely moving.
My favorite track is “model housing,” which might be the best introduction to what heavensouls is up to. The claustrophobia Obialo experienced walking through an American suburb full of identical houses — that feeling of being trapped in a world of conformity — runs through the record. “model housing” opens with an anti-capitalist call for liberation before launching into a mess of skittering percussion, saxophones, electronics, guitars, video-game noises, and an obscure rap freestyle. Every time you think you’ve figured out where it’s headed, it takes another left turn.
The nearly nine-minute opener “today is my favorite” is another marvel, with strings, sax, guitar, and percussion weaving in and out of an ever-changing arrangement. Across all six tracks, Obialo makes music that seems to operate according to its own laws of physics.
Which brings me to something worth emphasizing: don’t let the experimental tag scare you off. There’s plenty of challenging, head-spinning stuff happening across these records, but they’re also packed with moments of genuine beauty, irresistible rhythms, and melodies you’ll want to hear again. For all his restlessness, heavensouls never forgets that music should be fun to listen to.
We tend to talk about prodigies in terms of potential, imagining what they might accomplish once they’ve had another decade or two to develop. But what happens when the music they’re making right now is already this good? You stop grading on a curve. He’s made two of the best records anyone put out this year, regardless of age.
MVP! MVP! MVP!
I have no idea where heavensouls goes from here. Ten months ago, I didn’t even know his name. Now he’s responsible for my favorite album of 2026, another release that might be even better, and some of the most fascinating, beautiful, bewildering music I’ve heard in years.
Not a bad year for a 20-year-old.
Thanks for visiting The Wax Museum, and I’ll see you Friday for The Weekender,
Jared
“Mercifully for my year-end rankings, it’s technically an EP.” Hahaha this is relatable
Couldn’t agree more!!! True MVP.