Advance

"Advance" finds King Sunny Ade in his element as the architect of modern jùjú, layering Yoruba talking drums, sweet electric guitars, and the unmistakable cry of pedal steel into a hypnotic, slowly unfurling groove. Ade's music doesn't build to climaxes so much as it cycles and accumulates, and "Advance" works that way — percussion conversing in tonal patterns that mimic Yoruba speech, guitars chiming in bright interlocking figures, the whole ensemble breathing as one organism. His vocal delivery is gentle and incantatory, trading lines with a chorus in praise-singing tradition, weaving proverbs, blessings, and encouragement into the fabric. The pedal steel — a sound Ade made his own — lends an unexpected, almost weightless shimmer, sliding between notes like a second voice. Emotionally the track is buoyant and reassuring, a forward-pushing optimism baked into its very title; it feels like a benediction set to dance. Culturally this is jùjú at its peak, the sound that carried Yoruba aristocratic party music to global stages in the early 1980s, when Ade was briefly positioned as Bob Marley's successor on the world stage. The ideal setting is a long Lagos celebration where the band plays for hours and the music never quite resolves — designed not for the three-minute single but for the endless, communal, spinning night.