On March 27, 2026, Sons of Ubuntu released his first ever single. “Traveler (Sons of Ubuntu Remix),” out via St. Claire Records and Rain Labs, is a Dance and Afrohouse reimagining of a song originally written and performed by Nigerian alternative artist Celeste Ojatula and Ghanaian pop sensation Anabel Rose. It is the kind of record that sounds like it was made by people who were genuinely excited to be in the same room together, and it marks a turning point for one of Lagos’s most respected DJs.
A Song Already Alive
The original “Traveler” is a bossa nova-inflected piece built around Celeste Ojatula’s signature guitar plucks and a vocal performance that moves the way a long exhale does, unhurried and full of feeling. Anabel Rose co-wrote the song and her falsetto runs through it like a second voice in conversation with the first. Together, the two created something that sits closer to a mood than a conventional pop record, themed around adventure, escapism, and the particular restlessness of someone who is always looking just beyond the horizon.
What Sons of Ubuntu does with that material is not so much a deconstruction as a relocation. He takes the emotional core of the song and moves it from beachside serenity to the energy of a dancefloor without losing what made it worth dancing to in the first place. The guitar plucks survive. Celeste’s voice survives. Anabel Rose’s harmonies survive. What changes is the ground beneath them, which now pulses with the deep rhythmic grooves and African percussion that Sons of Ubuntu is known for. It is a careful piece of production work, the kind that only someone with a serious understanding of how music functions in a live setting could pull off.
The Lagos Rave Scene Grows Up
To understand why this release feels significant, you have to understand what the Lagos rave scene has become. What started as an underground current running beneath the city’s more commercially visible music culture has evolved into a full creative ecosystem with its own aesthetics, its own values, and its own stars. Sons of Ubuntu is among them. He co-founded Sweat It Out Lagos, which has become one of the defining events of the scene, and just days before this single dropped, he was behind the decks at December 2025’s sold-out Sweat Therapy. He is not an emerging figure. He is someone the scene already belongs to.
And yet, for all the cultural authority a DJ accumulates on the circuit, the medium resists permanence. A great set disappears by morning. The people who were there carry it with them, but there is no object, no artifact, nothing to share with someone who missed it. Releasing a single is Sons of Ubuntu’s answer to that problem. It is an argument, made in music, that what happens on these dancefloors is worth preserving.
Three Artists, One Vision
Part of what makes “Traveler (Sons of Ubuntu Remix)” worth paying attention to is the quality of the collaboration at its centre. Celeste Ojatula is not a passive presence on this record. Her vocal architecture is what the remix is built around, and the fact that it holds up so well under entirely different sonic conditions says something about how well constructed the original performance was. Anabel Rose’s falsetto, which lifted the original above the ordinary, does the same thing here. If anything, the higher-energy production reveals how much range both performances had to begin with.
Beyond the Room
What Sons of Ubuntu is doing with this release is part of a broader shift happening across Lagos, Johannesburg, and Accra. Nigerian DJs and rising artists are increasingly moving between the live circuit and the recording studio in ways that are producing genuinely new sounds, music that feels equally at home in a club in Lagos, a warehouse in Berlin, or someone’s headphones on a Tuesday morning commute. The best of it carries the spiritual quality of a great DJ set into a format that lasts. “Traveler (Sons of Ubuntu Remix)” is one of those records.
For Sons of Ubuntu specifically, this single represents a transition from being an artist who exists inside the event to being one who exists after it ends. That is not a small thing. It means his music can now travel to people who have never been to a Sweat It Out night, who have never stood in a Lagos warehouse at 2am wondering how a DJ can read a room that well. It means the conversation he has been having with dancefloors for years can now be had with the world.
The record is out now on all streaming platforms. It will not be the last one.
