Ikeja, no go thief?

Well Danpapa Gta should know better than most. Observing, recording all this while on a wooden bench for three, roadside Adeniyi Jones. 

Offsetting Akonuche, Healer, Danpapa’s early 2026 chart topper eschews optimistic atmospheres for something skittish. The sonic environment is Super mario, Fuji tasted staccato like something your friends put up with spoons and bottles, under wrists on table tops, after they have disappeared a consignment of palm wine. Palm wine music. In heart only, naturally drawn to impulsiveness, free spirited, like the boy pumping center of splotchy uniforms hooting up a school backyard in Ikotun; he’s doing that Alaga Reminisce thing. A night long studio session crawls out of a Nintendo, beaches on Tiktok by 3am, that unconscious hour notorious for cabinets of melodies and catchphrases that balloon into annoying earworms you catch yourself humming in staff meeting two weeks on; ‘No go thief for Ikejaa.’

A click beyond the gold haired street producer momentarily living the 7th most streamed song in the nation, Danpapa Gta shows up a serious artist. The only way he knows it, indeed, in his words, a Genuine Type of Artiste.

We have chanced on him in his Fela era, a rite of passage popstars are compelled to pass for generations to come. GenZ Kuti is the kind of fabric the hit record cut from; synth populated horns, gamey samples from heritage music, free to air television, 90s teen pop to everything besides. 40 naira samples Asake’s Active. Danpapa zankus along the crew of Gtas- Kingkoreax, Solution, Luh Drayco- to populate high energy beats with clever manipulations of the common vocabulary. With this exciting curious sound playing with form, they are applying the successful Uzama playbook. The underground has always been testing ground for new frontiers of afrosound. The success of a strain with a community of rappers, usually co-opted by a bigger artist as with Rema’s Alte inspired Rave and Roses, can propel a subgenre to dominance for the next cycle. Which means with consistency they would grow on the public. 

He says he makes music for fun. The earnestness met in 2024's Chanel now sits below the surface of all the masterstroke zest carrying on. 21, and a self declared vector of the generation maturing during institutional hubris, his applied contribution in inevitable; ‘just cause of the money they’re finding/omo kekere go de marry Alhaji, can you imagine/’ ‘the only way to see money/ carry the money illegally/ make dem de see you as bad person/ ko sha ma jaye lo jejeli/

Danpapa Gta’s vision is definitely one to watch for in 2026. May he keep dropping!