To truly grasp the weight of Let Us Clap, you have to first feel the vibration of the road. It’s a 15-hour haul from the humid, neon-flecked sprawl of Accra up to the arid stretches of Zebilla in the Upper East Region. This is a journey that sheds the slickness of the capital, trading the high-life gloss for themes of grassy savannah and the sharp, percussive reality of the Kusasi people. In Zebilla, clapping isn’t just a gesture of polite approval; it’s more of a communal language, a complex architecture of palms striking palms that defines the rhythm of the day. Lamisi, a powerhouse usually associated with the more polished spheres of Ghanaian jazz and pop, has returned to this ancestral frequency to create something that feels less like a studio project and more like a seismic shift.
Working alongside Wanlov the Kubolor, Ghana’s barefoot provocateur and a man whose very name means ‘wanderer’, Lamisi has bypassed the tired tropes of ‘Afrofuturism’ to land on something she calls African Futurism. It’s a vital distinction, a snapshot of a future built from the dirt up. The collaboration was a slow-burn process, with the duo meeting once a week for months, allowing the buzz of their combined star power, one an icon of roots-driven hip-hop, the other a vocal titan, to ferment into something raw and unapologetic.
The record opens with ‘Agol’, and immediately, the listener is disoriented in the best way possible. There are traditional flutes, yes, but they don’t sound pastoral. They drift over a distorted low-end bass that feels like it’s vibrating through the floor of a roadside chop bar at midnight – solemn, haunting, and anchored by tuned vocals and gongs that signal a ritual is underway. This is the kind of music that demands you sit with its tensions. On ‘Zane Ya Kinkin’, the atmosphere thickens. It is a song of welcome, stretching a hand from the Kusasi heartland to the Ashanti capital of Kumasi and back down to Accra, yet the voices remain distinct and jagged, chanting the title with a relentless, hypnotic energy.
The instrumentation throughout the album is a dense thicket of organic matter. You can hear the wood and the skin: dondo drums, xylophones, congas, and the hollow knock of the calabash. But there is a spooky, biting edge to how these sounds are captured. Wanlov’s production treats these ancient tools with a skeletal minimalism that feels almost industrial. Tracks like ‘Nisaal’ and ‘Unity’ move with a rapid-fire velocity, where the claps and the saxophones aren’t fighting for space but are instead woven into a subtle, driving volume. It’s a claustrophobic sort of groove, one that pulls you into the centre of the circle.
There is a profound political subtext here, too. Lamisi’s Fata Foundation is dedicated to the empowerment of girls in the Upper East, a region defined by a drastically patriarchal social structure. In that context, the very act of a group of women standing in a circle, clapping and singing in their mother tongue of Kusaal, is a radical reclamation of space. ‘No Orgasm In Heaven’ captures this spirit perfectly – slow, affirmative, and carrying a dry, biting wit regarding vanity and the body. It’s a stark contrast to the infectious, grooving energy of ‘Tumsum’ and ‘Salma Daka’. where the clapping becomes so enthusiastic it feels physical, like a pulse you can’t ignore.
By the time the album closes with ‘Painkiller’, the obsession is fully revealed. This is a track that treats music as a literal medicinal requirement, something to be taken in the morning and the night to numb the bruises of a hard-bump road. Let Us Clap succeeds because it doesn’t try to bridge the gap between West Africa and the global North by watering itself down. Instead, it invites the world to keep up. It is a textured, otherworldly whole that proves the most avant-garde sounds are often found in the most remote corners, if only you’re willing to take the long bus ride to find them.
