Halima’s debut album SWEET TOOTH is a bold declaration of power from an undeniable talent. Seductive, restless, and deeply assured, the record unspools like a night in motion. In the afterglow of her 2024 EP on drink sum wtr, praised by Clash Magazine, The Fader, BBC Radio, and others, the Brooklyn-based, UK/Nigerian musician solidifies her sound and expands it tenfold. If EXU was a spark, SWEET TOOTH is the full burn. Not so much genre-less as "genre-full"; the album spans a bright, lush world where club bangers meet deep ballads in a striking, fully-formed hybrid of honeyed Afro-pop and scorched R&B.Across its eleven tracks, Halima maps the push-pull of desire, transformation, and emotional reckoning. "Sweetness on my terms,” she offers a mantra for reclaiming softness without surrendering strength. “The album is about the journey to reclaim one's self amidst the chaos of life and ultimately acts as a love letter to the pleasures and pain of these human pursuits." While SWEET TOOTH declares Halima's artistic arrival, she calls it an epilogue, a reflection on past behaviors and lessons learned. "Am I the person that I wanted to grow into becoming? I think so. I've given myself permission to be free of those things. To be bold. To take up space."What began as a series of sketches — written in the margins of EXU's more structured sessions — slowly revealed a larger, more thrilling story. "I wasn't trying to construct a narrative," Halima explains. "I was just writing whatever felt good." But the connective tissue was always there: late nights, heartbreaks, full-time jobs, stolen moments — the in-between of becoming. "These songs carry three to four years of my life," she says. “And hearing them together as a whole, kind of feels like blowing the lid off.”Halima co-produced SWEET TOOTH with a sharp range of producers, including Mikey Freedom Hart (A$AP Rocky, Dev Hynes/Blood Orange, Empress Of), whose openness created room for her to explore. "He told me, this is your playground - do whatever you want,” she recalls. “So I picked up the guitar and started humming." That melody would become the album's emotional axis, ‘wasting my body’, introducing notions of physicality and yearning amidst the bittersweet reality of love dissolved. From there, things crystallized. The title track followed, along with the record’s central metaphor: sweetness as both offering and armor. “Studies show people with a sweet tooth are more agreeable,” Halima says. “That really hit. For me, people-pleasing is rooted in guilt, shame, and an irrational fear of rejection - it's my superego, which protected me once but is not my true self. SWEET TOOTH is my way through that reckoning.”The early standout ‘eleven eleven’ is a story of tension and disillusionment detailing the nine-to-nine grind and a late-night rave romance ("We lost track of the timing / Oh shit now I'm involved / She's in my bed"), all told across drum machine pulses and rattling hooks. Following in sonic and lyrical contrast, ‘eau de vie’ is all breath and yearning with Halima back in ballad mode; she asks plainly, "Am I your one baby? Coz you're my eau de vie," reaching for devotion. The album’s heartbeat surges on ‘cocoa body’, a full-throttle sensual cut that’s already the peak-time club scene in the album’s arc, and a fan favorite in Halima's recent live sets: rhythmic, radiant, and electric with presence.As SWEET TOOTH's day breaks, Halima's tone settles into serene introspection. She awaits her muse on ‘laundromat’ and feels them in a warm night breeze on 'november like u', a steely, pitch-shifting slow jam outlining an "imperfectly perfect love." "I won’t hide my glow no more / So everyday I’m writing love songs / Is that so wrong?” she declares on ‘callum,’ the album's closer. "Could you find me, babe?" — the question is wrapped in a shimmering swirl of hums, strings, and synth, leaving us with the vision of an artist content and grounded, no longer searching. The sheer electricity and fiery urgency of SWEET TOOTH ensures Halima's music will soon become one of the year’s most rewarding discoveries.
