Celeste Ojatula Is Building a World You Can Step Into

Celeste Ojatula's second EP, Our Time In The Sun, arrived on May 29, 2026, five self-produced tracks documenting the past five years of her life. Days after its release, she performed at SXSW London, her first international stage appearance, at Shoreditch Town Hall and XOYO in East London. Both things, the record and the debut, happened within the same week. For someone who has been building toward exactly this kind of moment since her first public performance at a rock festival in Lagos in 2015, the timing was less a coincidence than an arrival.

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In a conversation I had with her, she described Our Time In The Sun as a collection of songs about what it has been like to dream of what life could be. That framing is deliberate. The EP is not about where she has arrived. It is about everything that was held in the imagination while the conditions for the music to exist were still being assembled.

Celeste grew up in Lagos, the last of five children, in a household where sound arrived from multiple directions at once. Her father played gospel every morning through a Sony sound system that sat at the center of domestic life. Her sisters brought rock CDs home, and she absorbed those too. When her grandmother visited, she would read Yoruba literature with her, the older woman's presence pulling her toward a different register entirely, oral, rooted, unhurried. And when she was four, her family relocated to a suburb of Lagos where the neighborhood was still sparse enough that community happened in the open air. People came to each other's houses at Christmas to sing. Tales were told under the moonlight.

"All of those experiences," she says, "I wanted to find a way to recreate that into music."

The moonlight period didn't last long. Western influences moved into the neighborhood the way they moved into everything, gradually and then all at once, and the particular texture of that communal outdoor life faded. But the feeling of it stayed. She grew up without television for stretches of her childhood, which meant she read, and reading, like the moonlight stories, put images in her head that she didn't want to lose. The chord that runs through all of it, gospel, rock, Yoruba oral literature, moonlight tales, books read in the absence of screens, is something she can't fully attribute to any single source. It was just what the house was built out of.

Her first public performance was at Rocktoberfest in Lagos in 2015. Her debut single, "Black," followed in 2018, covered by Bella Naija and The Guardian Nigeria, and described at the time as alternative indie-folk drawing from human life, literature, and spirituality. By every external measure, something was beginning. From the inside, it was considerably more complicated.

The producers who understood what she was trying to do were expensive. The ones she could afford wanted to pull the sound somewhere else. So she stepped back. Not from the music, but from the version of it that required other people's infrastructure to exist. She took a full-time job, first as a designer at a media company, then as a creative strategist, and used those years to fund herself and teach herself production. She built the EP in the early hours of the morning, writing between work hours, losing sleep she needed. "I was even scared for my health," she says. "It was like, wow, you are really, really pushing yourself to the limit. And it's like, yeah, I'm here for all of it."

In 2022, she released "Light," the first single from what would become Alo. Her colleagues at the time put her songs in their newsletters. People she had never met started recognizing the sound. In 2023, “Oluronbi” followed, and the attention grew. By the time Alo arrived in 2024, fully independent, the audience that had been quietly assembling around her was ready. The Lagos headline show sold out. Our Time In The Sun followed in 2026, this time entirely self-produced.

The eight years between her first performance and her debut EP were not a delay. They were the only way the music could have arrived as fully formed as it did.

The question of what her music is actually trying to do has a specific answer, and she gives it without hesitation.

"When you read a really good book and you're just drawn into that world," she says, "that's exactly what I am trying to do."

She wants the listener to become the main character of the story, to hear something and find themselves inside it rather than outside it, watching. The word she reaches for is transcendental, not as a vague spiritual descriptor but as a precise one. She means transported. She means the feeling of being pulled so fully into an imagined world that coming back requires effort.

It connects directly to how she processes her own experience. She describes herself as someone who observes the world and learns from other people's experiences, someone for whom music is the clearest channel of expression, more direct than speech. "I'm not necessarily a vocal person," she says.

"I feel like I'm not great at expressing myself when I speak compared to when I am doing music. I want you to be able to see something when I'm communicating with you. I want you to be able to imagine things."

The moonlight stories her grandmother told, the books she read in the absence of television, the CDs that played through the Sony sound system every morning, all of them were doing the same thing, putting images in her head, transporting her. Her music is an attempt to return the favor.

Being an independent alternative artist in Lagos carries a specific kind of weight that doesn't fully reveal itself until you leave. When Celeste performed in London, she noticed something she hadn't expected. Basic logistics that would have required significant coordination and follow-up in Lagos resolved themselves in seconds. Sound engineers showed up prepared. Recordings happened without needing to be chased. "I did not overthink it," she says. "I was just like, wait, this is done in three seconds."

The reflection that followed was honest and slightly uncomfortable. She had instances in Lagos where she went to record a performance and came back with nothing. Then went again and came back with nothing again. The infrastructure for the kind of work she was trying to do existed, but accessing it reliably, at a price that made sense, with people who understood the sound she was going for, was its own sustained project. "A lot of the things that, you know, even in terms of how long it took me to do music, might have actually been avoided," she says. "Maybe if I had more access to people or more access to things."

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She says this without bitterness. It reads more like a data point she is still processing, a new way of understanding her own timeline now that she has a point of comparison. The gap years between her first performance and Alo were shaped by more than personal circumstances. They were shaped by the conditions of making a particular kind of music in a particular kind of city, and by how much of herself she had to supply where the infrastructure fell short.

When I asked her what comes next, she said, “more evolving than experimenting”. New sounds are already forming. The only thing she is certain won't come is Afrobeats, and even that she leaves slightly open, the way someone does when they trust the work to go where it needs to go rather than where they planned.

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Photos by: Teezah