Sanity

Album ∙ Afrobeats ∙ 2025

Bella Shmurda

You’d be sorely mistaken to think Bella Shmurda doesn’t understand the weight of his voice, but the magic of the Ghetto Preacher’s sermons is that they aren’t preachy. They land because they’re drawn from lived experience, not distance. The emotional core of Shmurda’s sophomore album Sanity is its brooding title track, where the singer can be found wrestling with purpose: “Everything we chase is vanity/My mind needs more clarity/For the wars I won, I’m proud of me.”

The sonics across Sanity are as restless and adventurous as ever. Shmurda stretches street pop into fresh shapes, layering amapiano’s logdrum on “Holy Jah” and “Bygone” with CKay, and then maintaining the communal vocals and robust percussion of fújì and apala on “Appraisal,” “Fuji Fusion” with K1 De Ultimate, and “Apala Fusion.” Dalliances with R&B are present as well in “Turn Me On,” with its clean, 2000s-indebted guitar lines, and on “Verily,” which samples Dennis Edwards’ seminal ’80s soul bop, “Don’t Look Any Further.” Shmurda closes out Sanity with “Family,” a reggae-leaning declaration of loyalty that plays as testament to his voice as both a street poet and seeker of meaning.