Y’akoto Is Back With New Single WMYT
Sexy is a word that could well be used to describe the new single from Ghanaian singer Y’akoto, ‘WMYT’, her second single of the year.
Sensuality and spirituality are two elements that the artist manages to combine with the sublime warmth of Afrobeats and other forms of West African pop music with the shimmering edge of modern dance music and contemporary R&B.
This track is highly contagious, so it’s sure to be hanging around in your head. Plus, it’s an empowering anthem that aspires to empower you to walk away from relationships that just don’t work.
WMYT is “a true story of me taking off in the middle of the night leaving my ex in the dust, realizing that I will never let another living human humiliate me again” she explains. “I often ask myself why women stay in relationships that hurt them for way too long. Coming from an abusive home, it’s a question I’ve been asking myself for way too long. It turned me into a beast. A soldier for female self-preservation. I can only talk about the female perspective because I am one. On top of that, I’m black”.
Jennifer Yaa Akoto Kieck was born in Hamburg, Germany, to a political scientist mother and a celebrated Highlife musician father. Her moniker, Y’akoto, exalts her heritage and her family history in the same way that her music does, acknowledging the legacy of the “kick-ass women” in her family as well as Ghana’s culture and its importance to her musical journey.
From the beginning, she has been relatively comfortable as an outsider which helped her with the music. A mixed-race child growing up in Ghana, where she was pegged as an odd-one-out due to her lighter skin; a Black child in Germany, where she spent her teen years and was one of few non-white people at her school.
Y’akoto looks at the tensions in romantic relationships, the alienation and power of immigrant children, and the bold, inherent strength of women the world over – finding a niche that’s both hypnotic and deeply romantic.