By Stuart G-Khast
Nina Shezz prepares to release her eagerly awaited debut album Speed Dial on July 23, 2025, the same day she celebrates another year of life.
This strategic timing is no coincidence. For an artist whose career trajectory has been defined by both serendipity and relentless craft, launching an album on her birthday signals a rebirth, a deliberate intersection of personal and professional milestones. From her early days as a backup vocalist for Frank Edwards; the first Nigerian gospel artist to launch an album with Don Moen and perform at a 200,000 capacity crusade, then even beat Beyoncé and Adele album by topping charts in 2016.
It’s undeniable Nina Shezz is emerging with an energy of surpassing her mentor. Nina Shezz in her emergence as a fully realized solo act, Nina Shezz has spent the last decade honing a signature Afrogospel-contemporary fusion that feels both deeply rooted in West African heritage and refreshingly experimental.
Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Nina Shezz’s musical journey began in church choirs, where she learned to navigate the spiritual nuances of gospel music. Her voice, at once supple and resonant, caught the attention of industry insiders early on. In 2019, she collaborated with Frank Edwards on the single Without You, released via Rocktown Records.
That track showcased her innate melodic sense and her ability to convey spiritual depth even in minimalist arrangements. Produced by Edwards’s in-house team, Without You featured subtle percussion, layered background vocals, and Nina’s lead vocal foregrounded in the mix, creating an intimate listening experience that hinted at her future potential.
Under Frank Edwards’s mentorship, Nina released a five-track extended play on her birthday, blending worship ballads with up-tempo grooves. Tracks like Eledumare and Unconditional Love, both released in 2021, demonstrated her willingness to push the boundaries of traditional gospel.
Eledumare combined live strings with electronic pads, while Unconditional Love paired Yoruba-inflected vocal runs with contemporary R&B-inspired drum programming. Her 2022 single Ayo climbed the Nigerian airplay charts, earning her recognition as one of the most promising voices in the country’s gospel scene. Radio listeners praised the song’s buoyant horns, syncopated percussion, and Nina’s impassioned refrains.
Despite her success in Nigeria, Nina Shezz yearned to expand her creative horizons. In 2023, she seized an opportunity to collaborate with Uganda’s Malcolm Rue of Soulville Records on the single Adore, featuring Nicole Muwanguzi. That track marked a turning point in her career.
With its driving tom-kit groove, punchy snares, and resonant bass lines, Adore was engineered for both worship and the dance floor. The production employed stereo panning techniques that placed Nina’s vocals slightly left in the mix while Nicole’s harmonies sat to the right, creating an immersive stereo field. The drum programming was reminiscent of Afrobeat but infused with gospel sensibilities, ensuring that the track felt both familiar and novel to listeners across the continent. When Adore sparked a viral TikTok challenge, the pan-African buzz it generated laid fertile ground for Nina’s next project.
Building on the momentum of Adore, Nina Shezz retreated into studio and writing sessions to conceive Speed Dial. She describes the album as an album of divine urgency, born from personal encounters and guided by the Holy Spirit.
This sense of urgency permeates every track. Across eleven songs, she weaves vibrant instrumentation — live percussion, analog synth textures, gospel choir arrangements, and cross-continental EDM elements courtesy of the production collective Los Padres. The album opens with a track titled Calling My Name, with the energetic electric guitar arpeggios flow to the rudimentary of kicks, creating tension that resolves in Nina’s soaring chorus. She employs call-and-response vocal arrangements to engage listeners, echoing the interactive spirit of African worship services.
The second track, Hotline, lives up to its title by layering punchy snares with pulsing bass stabs that mimic the anticipation of a phone vibrating in your pocket. Nina’s lyrics invite believers to stay spiritually connected, as if on speed dial with heaven. She sings, “When trouble comes I reach for the line, I don’t have to wait because the line is mine,” over a bed of sustained synth pads and finger snaps. The production nods to contemporary gospel trends while retaining her distinctive Afrogospel flair.
One of the album’s standout moments is The Word, a collaboration with Los Padres that fuses EDM drops with gospel vocal runs. Here Nina experiments with side-chain compression, creating that characteristic pumping effect that makes the synths and drums breathe in time with the kick drum.
She pairs that with layered choir harmonies in the bridge, generating a thrilling dynamic contrast that invites both reflection and movement. The track’s structure — intro, verse, pre-drop buildup, drop, bridge, and final chorus — demonstrates her command of modern pop songcraft infused with spiritual messaging.
Speed Dial also features more intimate moments. On the ballad Rest My Soul, Nina strips back the production to piano, soft string suspensions, and her voice in full focus. The song’s sparse arrangement emphasizes her dynamic control and emotional depth. She moved listeners on early previews, with church choirs in Abuja singing along to the hook, “In your presence I’m found, in your stillness I’m sound,” testifying to the track’s grassroots resonance.
As she crafted Speed Dial, Nina faced a pivotal moment in her career. She prayed earnestly during negotiations with a major label that initially offered her a deal. When the label returned with a request for greater ownership of publishing rights and creative control, she sensed the offer’s oppressive weight. Instead of capitulating, she declined and continued to trust that a better path would emerge. Soon after she shared her dilemma in a private online session with fervent fans. One devoted listener suggested Speed Dial as an album title, describing the music as a direct line to the divine. Inspired by that moment, Nina embraced both the name and the principle it conveyed: spiritual connection on demand, without gatekeepers.
Within weeks another global imprint expressed genuine interest, impressed by her independent momentum and pan-African appeal. However, rather than pause her release strategy for contract finalization, Nina committed to an independent rollout. She believes that music should speak for itself, and that listeners would judge Speed Dial on its own merits. Early previews on radio across Nigeria, Uganda, and South Africa generated enthusiastic listener feedback, while social media clips of fans dancing to snippets in the USA and UK confirmed that Speed Dial was already moving like wildfire through diaspora communities.
Anchored in Psalm 145:18 — “The Lord is close to all who call on him in truth” — Speed Dial is as much a devotional statement as it is a musical one. It signals a new era for African gospel music, one in which artists refuse to be confined to local markets or pigeonholed by industry conventions. Nina Shezz insists on sharing her sound on global stages, in international festival lineups, and on prominent streaming playlists alongside secular contemporaries. Her approach is refreshingly unapologetic: faith-driven artistry can be both spiritually potent and rhythmically compelling.
In her interviews, Nina often references the mantra attributed to Michael Jackson that sound, when repeated, shapes the mind. She sees gospel music in her hands as a dual‐edged instrument, capable of stirring worshipful tears and igniting dance-floor joy. Speed Dial is populated by tracks that oscillate between worship ballads and uptempo anthems, creating a listening experience that mirrors the full spectrum of human spiritual expression.
The album culminates in a powerful finale titled Resurrection Power, an eight-minute suite that moves from contemplative organ chords into a celebratory gospel-house rhythm, complete with live horns and hand-clap percussion. Here Nina invites worship leaders and DJs to reinterpret the track for church services or club sets, embodying her vision of gospel transcending traditional boundaries.
Beyond the music, Nina Shezz represents exactly the type of talent the UK’s Global Talent Visa programme seeks to attract. She brings world-class creativity, cultural leadership, and an unshakable vision for gospel’s evolving future. With no major label machine behind her, no traditional marketing budget, and a growing international fanbase, she exemplifies how independent artists can leverage digital platforms, social media, and genuine artistry to forge global careers.
On July 23, 2025, Speed Dial drops in full on all major streaming services and will be available in physical formats via her website. A series of album launch shows is already planned across Lagos, Kampala, Johannesburg, London, and New York. Each show promises a live band, choir ensembles, and choreographed movements that bring the album’s themes of divine urgency and sonic celebration to life.
Believers and music lovers everywhere are invited to answer the call. Nina Shezz’s Speed Dial is not just an album. It is a movement. It is a declaration that gospel music can be as bold, as infectious, and as boundary-crossing as any other genre, without sacrificing its devotional heart. It is proof that when faith and artistry converge, the result can reshape global conversations. And on July 23 the world will be on speed dial with heaven.
