Burna Boy once made vulnerability sound regal. Since 2019’s African Giant, the Nigerian superstar has moved like an artist enthroned, folding Pan-African futurism, dancehall, and hip-hop into an Afrobeats vision large enough to house them all. His albums have played like coronations, brimming with genre fusions, A-list guests, and the kind of swaggering that only works when it’s natural. But on his eighth studio album, No Sign of Weakness, Burna takes a defensive turn: He’s clinging to the throne, trying to convince us that the crown still fits.
As ever, the music glitters. Burna glides through highlife, baile funk, soul, rap, and even a dash of country and Britrock. Darker, grittier production occasionally pulls Burna out of sunlit stadiums to underground clubs. But while the beats evolve, he stays rigid. His genre-bending feels less like an act of discovery and more like a performance of it; his country detour with Shaboozey, for example, drifts by like a string of empty promises from a flaky ex.
On previous albums, Burna was self-assured yet emotionally porous, quick to remind you he’d suffered before he succeeded. Here, he sounds sealed off. No Sign of Weakness airs out old beefs and petty grudges, firing shots at imaginary haters and anyone who didn’t clap loud enough. “My enemies are no longer on the street or the roads/Now they’re on the internet or the blogs/And in my sold-out shows looking for empty chairs,” he divulges at one point, with the tunnel vision of someone stuck in the comment section.
Even the flexes sound defensive. On opener “No Panic,” a soukous-tinged track built from coiled congas and fluttering shekeres, Burna chants “Me, I no panic,” like a nervous tic. When he brags, “Use Timberland match all of them,” recalling a past concert altercation, the machismo reads more cornered than alpha.
Lyrically, the songs cling to familiar themes of loyalty, betrayal, and soured romance, but the writing feels hollow. Repetition, once a rhythmic weapon in his songwriting, becomes a crutch and registers as filler. On “Love”—not to be confused with the more compelling, reggae-dipped “Sweet Love”—he drops the clunker “fuck the world with the large condom.” It’s a jarring line made worse by the synth-pop backing that could’ve scored a Disney Channel movie. Burna Boy doesn’t sound like he’s having fun anymore. He sounds like he’s bracing for a fall no one else is predicting.
The collaborations, often a highlight of Burna’s records, mostly underwhelm. Travis Scott barely registers on “TaTaTa,” a baile funk bounce that coasts on its percussion-heavy rhythm and serpentine flute outro. The Mick Jagger cameo on “Empty Chairs” sounds like a PR stunt, lacking any interplay. The lone standout is Belgian singer Stromae, who turns “Pardon” into something hushed and weightless. Singing in French, his elasticity weaves through Burna’s Nigerian pidgin and English, blurring languages and styles with an effortlessness the rest of the album struggles to find.
No Sign of Weakness insists on strength but is haunted by the fear of losing it. In trying to prove he’s invincible, Burna Boy seems to have forgotten the power that came from letting us see the man underneath the myth. Here’s hoping he remembers next time.
