Seun Kuti & Egypt80 – Na Dem feat. Tom Morello

Seun Kuti and Egypt 80 have released “Na Dem”, a collaboration with Tom Morello produced by Femi Koleoso of Ezra Collective. The lineup alone carries weight: Kuti is Fela’s son and Egypt 80 was his father’s band, Morello is the Rage Against the Machine guitarist, and Koleoso, who also drums here alongside Mario Orsinet, brings a production sensibility rooted in exactly this intersection of Afrobeat, jazz, and music-as-statement. Engineered and mixed by Riley MacIntyre, mastered by Stuart Hawkes at Metropolis Studios in London.

The lyrics run through politicians, presidents, senators, civil servants, governors, imams, reverends, bishops, pastors, police, soldiers, customs officers, businessmen, oil traders, bankers, and lawyers, naming each category a “winch man”: a Yoruba-derived term for someone who drains, corrupts, or works harm through unseen means. The repetition is deliberate and cumulative, the list expanding verse by verse until the net has caught everything with power over ordinary life. The Yoruba passages, “Ori mi gbe mi, je n ye / J’abo l’owo awon obaluje”, call on personal spirit and destiny to carry the speaker free from those who abuse it. The final turn, “As dem chop we peace we chop dem eye”, is not despair but refusal: if they consume what is ours, we consume what is theirs.

Egypt 80’s rhythm section holds the groove steady underneath all of it, eighteen musicians credited in total, and Morello’s solo guitar arrives as a controlled burst rather than a showpiece. Kuti’s saxophone and voice anchor the track throughout. The production doesn’t over-polish any of this, which is correct: “Na Dem” is meant to land with friction.

Kuti has said he waited a long time to release this. It shows, in the best sense.