Darkoo has been doing her homework – going to gigs, studying other artists’ shows, analysing the stage design and the composition of background musicians and vocalists – in preparation for her first-ever headline show at KOKO in Camden, London. She went to her close friend Ayra Starr’s concert three nights in a row. She took notes during Usher’s now-infamous game at his arena shows – the one where a lucky fan gets to lick a cherry suggestively, inches from his face. And when she saw Sabrina Carpenter stage a PG-13 sex scene behind a backlit curtain during Bed Chem on tour, Darkoo immediately shared it with her team.
“I was like, ‘Yo, this is the vision!’” says the 23-year-old, grinning mischievously. And so that’s exactly how she began her sold-out show in April, met with the rapturous roar of adoring fans. Keen pop culture scholars will have clocked the references throughout: the opening number Right Now, for instance, in which Darkoo received a backlit lap dance from a female dancer, before the curtain dropped and the crowd went wild (a nod to Carpenter); the kiss-cam that turned on the audience mid-show, encouraging the crowd to lips the nearest person – a moment Darkoo now says will be her signature move, à la Usher’s cherry. “You come to a Darkoo show and you might find love,” she says, laughing. “Or just kiss someone.”
Now, two days later, on a swelteringly hot day for spring, we’ve taken refuge in a refreshingly air-conditioned hotel bar in Shoreditch, London. The gig is the latest in a list of triumphs for Darkoo: only a few weeks ago, she won big at the MOBOs, taking home Best Female Act and Song of the Year for 2024 single Favourite Girl. It’s clear that she’s still riding high on the thrill of a job well done, luxuriating in the wave of overwhelmingly positive feedback (“everyone keeps saying it’s the best show they’ve been to in a while”) and the buzz of performing for a crowd who screamed every word to every song. “There was one point where I was trying to sing but the crowd was so loud,” she says, still grinning. “I remember just smiling, looking at them and thinking, ‘Wow, this is for me.’”
She sure looks the part. Darkoo is not particularly flashy or pretentious – in fact, when she arrives for our interview, she waits outside to finish the box of chicken strips she picked up en route. But her off-duty rockstar look – a vintage The Clash T-shirt, baggy jeans studded with diamantés, tattoos snaking down both arms and a hefty diamond-encrusted chain slung around her neck – is just enough to suggest that she’s, well, someone. Her confidence is quiet but certain; relaxed, open and playful, while still wise to the mechanics of the music industry.
This is an artist who, after all, has been in the game for nearly a decade. Born Oluwafisayo Isa in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2001, before moving to the UK at age seven, Darkoo had the kind of come-up most playground rappers can only dream of. First came the secondary school rap battles, bars and disses written in ICT class, in response to beef with another nearby girls’ school. Then, encouraged by a friend who had a home studio setup, she started to sing and record her own songs.
In the years that followed, her sound evolved rapidly, from would-be drill MC to rising Afrobeats crooner. By the end of 2019, she’d released her first official single Gangsta, a slick love song featuring rapper One Acen and a titular, catchy hook: “I’m tryna love you like a gangsta / Baby would you answer?” Within a year, it had become the UK’s biggest Afrobeats track of 2020 and earned Darkoo three MOBO nominations: Best Female Act, Best Newcomer and Song of the Year. At the time, she was still in college, casually juggling viral fame with applications to study engineering at university.
“When I started having label meetings, I said to my mum, ‘I don’t think I’ve got to do the school thing any more,’” she says. “I tried for months to keep going to classes, but it was too much.” It wasn’t just the chart success and award shows. At 18, Darkoo was catapulted into the international spotlight, hailed as the future of Afrobeats both in London and in West Africa. Pretty soon, she was in the studio with everyone from British rapper Hardy Caprio to Ghanaian wunderkind Black Sherif; performing onstage with genre legends such as Wizkid and rubbing shoulders with Stormzy at BRITs afterparties. “It was insane – a lot for an 18 year old, but not in a bad way,” says Darkoo, slumping back into a plush cream armchair. “I think I had the right people around to guide me and show me the way.”
It perhaps also helps that music was never Darkoo’s plan A. During her early years in Yaba, Lagos, young Oluwafisayo dreamed of becoming a footballer. She’d spend all her time outside, playing without shoes – an unapologetic tomboy with a “number one trim and one earring”. She describes her family as middle class; her father a pharmacist and her mother a lecturer at Yaba College of Technology, Nigeria’s first higher education institution. Darkoo remembers that time as pure fun, but her parents wanted more for her and her older sister. So, her mother moved to the UK when Darkoo was five, juggling three jobs in Peckham, Southeast London, to get set up before the rest of the family could join her two years later.
“That was the hardest time of my life,” says Darkoo, her voice lowering with the weight of the memory. “I still have that feeling in my belly. I couldn’t stop crying.” She remembers going into her mother’s wardrobe, smelling clothes and trying on heels, grasping at memories of her at a time before FaceTime and Skype made connecting with global relatives so much easier. “I’m a mummy’s girl, I missed her so much.”
Things didn’t get much easier when the rest of the family eventually joined her mother in the UK. By then, the family had settled in Bexley – technically in South London, but closer to Kent in terms of culture, a strategic decision designed to keep “troublemaker” Darkoo on the straight and narrow. Her classmates at primary school were majority white; the English she’d spoken in Nigeria didn’t click with British slang.
“At first, I was bullied a bit. But I’m tough, man – and persistent. I learned to look around at my surroundings and make it work,” she says. Darkoo remembers standing on the sidelines of the playground, analysing the way other kids spoke to each other, picking up Britishisms here and there. And, of course, music helped – specifically, Justin Bieber’s Baby, the first song she heard on British soil, giving her a whistle-stop education on how to speak. Eventually, she says, “I ended up being one of the popular kids.”
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Darkoo – beyond the music, the accolades and her rapid rise – is her ability to shrug off adversity and back herself with charm. When she’s celebrating her wins, it doesn’t sound like bragging. When she reflects on her setbacks, she’s not looking for sympathy. Sitting here, as the sun beams in through the bar’s floor-to-ceiling windows, there’s no performance in how she presents herself. This is a woman who wholly embodies her identity – even when it might come at a cost.
“I’ve always been like this. I love myself. I’m so confident in myself,” says Darkoo, as if the act of self-love is as natural to her as breathing. “And since I came out to my parents, I’m the best I’ve ever been.” Darkoo came out as a gay woman to her family not long after the release of Gangsta in 2019. Her newfound fame made her conscious of the fact her personal life could quickly become a news story. She was nervous, but didn’t have to be. After two quick, separate conversations with her parents, the weight was immediately lifted. Darkoo was still the daughter they’d raised to be defiantly self-assured.
“I can’t imagine having to hide who I am, especially because I’m really close to my parents. I’m just happy they were able to understand,” she says. “My parents have always built me up to be confident and allowed me to do what I wanted.” Suddenly, Darkoo’s serious tone cracks into a smile. “To be fair, they should have known. Growing up, I only wanted to wear boys’ clothes. One time they put me in a dress to go to a party and I cried so much I had to stay at home – and that was a party I really wanted to go to!”
Darkoo’s worries about coming out were not entirely unfounded. It’s a milestone that’s stressful to navigate for any young queer person, not least when the laws of their home country explicitly criminalise their identity. Nigeria has some of the most repressive anti-homosexuality laws in Africa. On paper, being gay can land you up to 14 years in prison. In practice, the consequences can be even worse. Violence and police brutality are rife, as are attacks and discrimination from members of the public.
“Being who I am – gay and Nigerian – it’s not an easy thing,” says Darkoo, with calmness and clarity. “Fortunately, a lot of my fanbase is from Nigeria and they just like who I am.” Still, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t adjust her behaviour slightly when visiting home. “When I do go to Nigeria, I just have to be respectful of the laws. My safety is important.” Darkoo chooses her words carefully, taking a moment to decide on her conclusion. “In terms of the laws, you’ve got to keep it respectful. In terms of my family? They accept me. They love me.”
It’s tempting to over-analyse Darkoo’s complexities – the tension between her home country’s laws and her sexuality, the contrast between her Nigerian roots and British adolescence. But the artist herself doesn’t seem too concerned with unravelling the knots of her selfhood. Take, for example, her two stage personas, Darkoo and Darkisha. Two sides of the same coin, but each representing a different facet of her identity. Darkoo is the woman who shows up most of the time, wearing baggy clothes and her hair in dreads. Darkisha is the hyper-femme alter-ego, all lashes, pink eyeshadow and blonde wigs. You catch glimpses of her in music videos (see: the shoplifting baddie she portrays for Ayra Starr collab Disturbing U), effortlessly interchanging between femininity and the more masculine, default Darkoo mode.
It’s a long way off from the girl who once cried when put in dresses. “But it’s all natural,” she insists. “Well, maybe Darkisha is a bit harder, because I don’t like wearing heels.” The makeup and the hair, however, are genuine interests for the artist. Like most teenage girls with internet access, Darkoo spent hours watching makeup tutorials as a kid, learning how to execute the perfect cut crease and passing on tips to her mum. “I was obsessed,” she says. Playing with the gender norms, then, is less about making a statement and more about being true to herself. “Now, I’m more comfortable being myself [with no makeup], because it’s nice to wake up and just have a shower. But that is part of me I love to embrace. It’s exciting. I love seeing my friends’ reactions when I have a full face of makeup and do my hair.”
Still, straddling both sides of her identity isn’t easy in an industry built to put people in boxes. “It’s hard sometimes, because I feel like people never really know where to put me,” says Darkoo. In the past, she’s felt compelled to confront intrusive questions around her identity, taking to X in 2023 to shut down the negative discourse: “I’ve never been confused about my gender. I have no desire to be a man. I am a Black female, masculine characteristics but female.” But these days, she lets it roll off her back. “It used to upset me, but then I realised that’s how special I am – you can’t even put me in boxes. You don’t know if you’re comparing me to the mandem or the girls. You just know that I’m lit.”
The biggest challenge, Darkoo says, hasn’t been navigating invasive questions around her sexuality and image – although there’s been plenty. It’s been wrestling for artistic independence when thrust into the limelight at such a young age. She’s always been savvy about the music industry, but making yourself heard in rooms full of people with vested interests can be difficult – even for seasoned pros. And Darkoo didn’t only have to convince people of her power; she needed to prove that Afrobeats was the future.
“They didn’t see the vision,” she says. “I knew Afrobeats is what I’m supposed to do, but they didn’t have a plan [for my journey as an artist]. Some people might say I was difficult, but I have to protect my music. I have to protect my identity. I have to protect myself.”
As the pandemic hit and battles for artistic control intensified, Darkoo entered a period of depression. “I was definitely very suicidal. I just didn’t feel understood.” What pulled her out of that dark time? Going independent in 2023. Almost immediately, her “sauce and passion” for music was revived, and with it came a wave of relief. “My life has been upwards from there. It did scare me a little bit, not being signed – and I’m open to being signed in the future. I just want to be signed by the right people who will be like, ‘I want to make this girl the biggest star.’” And until that happens, Darkoo’s determined to prove her worth as an independent artist.
“Now, I’m three bangers in and no one can say nothing!” she says, laughing. The reception to those said three bangers speaks for itself. Last year’s Favourite Girl, featuring US rapper Dess Dior became a quick fan favourite, thanks to its savvy sample of dancehall classic Diwali Riddim (you’ll recognise it from Lumidee’s Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh)) and Darkoo’s swooning yet swaggering lyricism. Then, she upped the ante by enlisting Afrobeats royalty Davido for Right Now, showcasing her more sentimental side with lyrics such as “You’re the kind of woman that I want to have my kids with”. Now, she’s hailing 2025 as the year everyone has a “Sexy Girl Summer”, ushered in with party anthem Focus On Me (All The Sexy Girls In The Club) – the kind of song that seems destined to soundtrack long, hot days in the city over the coming months. Darkoo also featured on last month’s F1 The Album soundtrack alongside Dojo Cat, Burna Boy, Raye and Ed Sheeran. One week after we meet, she releases a surprise single Like Dat, the video of which features her now trademark gyrating female dancers and pays homage to her British roots with Union Jack flags in the background.
But Darkoo’s full vision as an independent artist will be revealed in the next few months, [no release date or title was available at time of publication] on her upcoming EP: seven tracks recorded in Zanzibar with a team of her favourite producers. The vibe is Y2K but not derivative. Rather than leaning fully into nostalgia, the musician once again became a student of her craft, analysing the instruments, chord progressions and sonic textures of her favourite noughties tracks, then translating them into songs stamped with her signature Afrobeats flair.
“It was like, OK, Rihanna made a massive hit with these five instruments, so let’s use those to play different things,” she says. Above all, though, this project is driven by Darkoo’s ambition to create music for women, not just about them. “Not enough artists make music for women,” she says. “I’m trying to make music that they listen to and feel like, ‘I’m the baddest bitch in this place. I’m gonna go on a yacht and I’m gonna shake my bum.’ You know, music that makes them feel themselves.”
The truth? Darkoo’s already achieved that mission – literally, if the wild crowd at KOKO was anything to go by, but also simply by owning her story. In a world that increasingly sees difference as a threat, an artist with such a clear, assured claim over her identity shines like a beacon of hope. Her presence in pop culture isn’t only earned, it’s needed: to show others what’s possible when you drop the mask and embrace who you are; to prove that you don’t need to stick to the status quo to succeed.
“Two years ago, a close friend told me that I’d changed her life,” says Darkoo, reflectively. “She said, ‘It’s because of how confident you are and how much you don’t care about who you are. It changed the way I see myself. I came out to my parents because of you.’”
It was an affirming moment, an albeit drunk confession shared between friends that only fortified her sense of purpose. “Because, listen to me, I walk in the room and I don’t care what you think. I’m living my life. It’s not your problem. It’s not your business to judge.” She sits back in her chair and, for the last time, flashes that mischievous grin. “My energy is great and I have a pure heart, so everyone who meets me falls in love with the aura.” Overconfident? Some might say so. But once you meet Darkoo, you can’t deny it.
Darkoo's EP ‘$exy Girl $ummer (Vol. 1)’ will be released on 20th June.
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