Before the Vocals, There Were Drums: TuneWalker’s “Hakeem”
Most of what gets pushed through streaming platforms right now is built for the voice. Hooks, melodies, features, the whole discovery machine runs on vocals. So when someone puts out a purely instrumental project in 2025 and expects it to find an audience, they’re either naive or they’re making a point. TuneWalker seems to be making a point.
Hakeem is named after the artist’s birth name, Mustapha Adeniyi Hakeem, and contains two tracks at just under seven minutes. He plays multiple instruments across both: drums, sax, keys, bass guitar. The talking drum, which dominates his visual presentation, is the gangan, the Yoruba hourglass drum that can reproduce the tones and rhythms of spoken language. For generations it was how messages were carried across distances, how ceremonies were opened, how lineage was announced. TuneWalker putting it at the centre of his image isn’t a branding decision. It’s a statement about where his music comes from.
“Tornado” opens with the kind of heavy percussion that makes more sense in a room than through earbuds. The Amapiano influence is there in the bounce, but the layering feels lived-in, these aren’t samples, they’re played. When the trumpets come in at the hook the track gains a brass-band energy that pushes it past club music into something more communal. The electric guitar that follows becomes the melody, and it’s effective. Not flashy, not overplaying. Just doing what the song needs.
“Hurricane” slows things down and spreads out. The shekere provides the rhythmic base, that familiar gourd-and-bead rattle, while the track builds gradually toward a saxophone hook that is, by a fair margin, the strongest moment on the project. The phrasing is patient. It doesn’t rush to the high note or lean on technical runs. It sits in the groove and lets the melody do the work, which is harder than it sounds.
The naming convention, “Tornado,” “Hurricane”, is on the nose, but it tracks. Both tracks build. Both carry force without being aggressive. And the decision to keep things instrumental throughout means the instruments have to carry everything: mood, narrative, climax, resolution. Across these seven minutes, they do. The Afrobeats-Amapiano fusion sound has plenty of vocalists. What it could use is more players. TuneWalker is clearly one, and Hakeem is his way of letting you know.
