Sali Clinton, Northampton-based and originally from South-South Nigeria, put out My Darling in 2024. Slow, warm Afro-fusion. Plain in the best sense, and the easiest way into the catalogue of one of the more interesting independent voices in current UK Afro-fusion.
Try pinning his sound down, go on. Gospel’s the root: he started in church. But in My Darling the influence shows up as subtle vocal layering rather than any overt church inflection. Soul, blues, and Afrobeats turn up too, depending on what he’s writing. He resists the genre tag and you can hear it. My Darling is the warmest, most clearly Afro-fusion thing in his catalogue. His 2022 single So Long, written when he says he was disconnected from people, from routine, even from music itself, is something else entirely: a hushed acoustic R&B thing that doesn’t sound like the same artist made it.
Here’s the thing about his backstory: his dad kept catching him with a borrowed guitar past midnight. Sent him back to bed, but he carried on. First child of a traditional Nigerian household, raised on the assumption he’d train as an engineer, no instrument of his own, practising in the furthest room of the house after everyone had gone to sleep. There’s something quietly stubborn in his music that you only build by ignoring people for a long time. Years later, that self-taught player with no formal training would write and record original music for Flaws, the 2023 Diana Childs Productions feature on Amazon Prime, and supply tracks to TNC Africa’s Our Best Friend’s Wedding, a YouTube series that clocked several million views.
Now, the track.
Warm guitar loop, the spine of the whole track. Highlife rhythms, clean tone, a bit of soul guitar in the playing. Underneath, the drums are steady and hypnotic: crisp shakers, disciplined rim-shot, kick rounded rather than punched. The bass is felt more than heard, a deep warm undercurrent that gives the track a rhythmic weight often missing in purely digital loops. The mix doesn’t give a damn about grabbing you. That’s the point. Reference points, if you’re after them: the Made in Lagos era of Wizkid, Omah Lay’s conversational softness, a bit of the Juls school of London-via-Accra production that’s been quietly excellent for years and somehow never quite credited for it.
The vocal knows when to back off. A breathy tenor that rises into falsetto on the lifts and otherwise stays low and close. The hook hangs on one seasonal line: “You give me love, give me reasons, to love you in and out of seasons.” It’s plainer than current Afro-fusion songwriting tends to go. Just a man saying he’ll show up.
He’s a live bassist on top of his recording work, and that musicianship comes through. The drums might be programmed but the pocket has the feel of a band that’s spent serious time together in rooms, not a session assembled in a browser tab at three in the morning.
Now, the criticisms. The song commits to its loop. Vibe over variety, hypnosis over arc. By the fourth play, the loop had outlasted my attention; a bridge with any kind of dynamic shift would have stretched the song’s lifespan. Some listeners won’t care. Others will.
Honestly, though? I’d take this kind of restraint over the overproduced TikTok bait we’re getting flooded with right now. It’s the sound of an artist with no incentive to do anything but please himself, and that’s increasingly rare.
He’s currently building up his UK presence, particularly around the Midlands, and he’s been open about wanting to help families see creative work as a viable career path. Given how rarely anyone in this industry says that out loud, that counts for something. An EP is next.
Worth your time. And worth following.
