Friday, September 18. Innocent Idibia turned 51, and he didn’t spend the day quietly.
“Mental,” his new single with rising star Fave, dropped the same morning. No delay between the milestone and the music. His manager and partner, Mallam Yankee, confirmed the timing was deliberate, a birthday gift 2Baba handed straight to his own fans instead of the other way around.
The track itself sits comfortably inside familiar territory for him. Mutual attraction. Commitment. The kind of grounded, adult love story 2Baba has revisited across three decades of writing about it differently each time. Fave answers from the same emotional register rather than playing a contrasting role, turning “Mental” into something closer to a conversation than a duet.
Producer Dee Yasso built the sound around that dynamic. Afro-pop foundation, contemporary texture, room left deliberately open for two very different voices to trade space without crowding each other. 2Baba brings the weight of decades. Fave, who broke through in 2021 with “Baby Riddim” and built a reputation on emotionally direct songwriting, brings a lighter vocal color that keeps the record from settling into nostalgia alone.
It’s his first release of 2026 outside December’s “Celebrate,” and it’s not standing alone for long.
“Mental” doubles as the first real preview of “Oldest Young Man,” 2Baba’s forthcoming studio album and his first full-length project in six years. That gap matters. Six years is a long silence for an artist whose career stretches back to the Plantashun Boiz days, long before “African Queen” made him a name outside Nigeria entirely.
Saturday kept the celebration moving. A private dinner. An album listening party in Victoria Island, Lagos, running from 7 p.m. to midnight, packed with friends, industry names, and guests who got early ears on tracks from the coming album before the rest of the world does.
There was a reunion too, unplanned in the sense that nobody announced it, but unforgettable for the room. 2Baba and Faze, his old Plantashun Boiz bandmate, pulled off a freestyle that pulled the crowd straight back to the late 1990s, when the group, alongside Ahmedu “Blackface” Obiabo, was reshaping what Nigerian music sounded like before any of them went solo. The applause reportedly didn’t need coaxing.
Yankee described the whole rollout in bigger terms than a single birthday weekend. He’s calling it the start of a golden era, new music, new business ventures, and an album six years in the making, all landing inside one 48-hour stretch.
Because music wasn’t the only launch. 2Baba also introduced 2Baba Jollof at the same event, stepping fully into entrepreneurship under his own name rather than lending it to someone else’s brand. For an artist who’s spent 51 years building a catalogue, adding a food business to that portfolio reads less like a side hustle and more like a man diversifying on his own terms.
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Not every familiar face showed up. Natasha Osawaru was absent from the gathering. So was Pero Adeniyi, mother to three of his children, though she’d quietly liked his birthday post online weeks earlier, a small gesture that didn’t go unnoticed by fans tracking the family’s long, complicated history in public.
None of that pulled focus from the night’s real business.
“Oldest Young Man” is coming. “Mental” just opened the door.
