Godwin is part of a new wave of Nigerian artists reshaping what intimacy sounds like. A singer, filmmaker, and storyteller from Kaduna, he carries his emotions like instruments — letting them breathe through tender melodies, cinematic arrangements, and lyrics that feel almost confessional. First known for his work with the globally recognised filmmaking collective The Critics Company, he has slowly evolved into one of the country’s most arresting voices, blending northern cadence with soulful pop and a filmmaker’s instinct for narrative. His music doesn’t just play — it unfolds, scene by scene, revealing a young artist unafraid of vulnerability, faith, or the messy edges of love.
There’s a gentleness to Godwin — the kind that makes you lean in, not because he’s quiet, but because he speaks with intention. His music does the same. Atonement, his latest project, feels like a film wrapped in melody: scenes unfolding, emotions rising, characters entering and exiting without warning.
“I see music first. In visuals. In film,” he tells me, laughing as he admits he thought his answer might sound “sloppy.” But it’s anything but that. For Godwin, movies were his earliest teachers in the art of feeling. From there, sound became a continuation; another way of telling stories when words and pictures weren’t enough.
Atonement isn’t the product of a single moment. It’s a collected journey. After releasing Road to Nirvana — a project heavy with grief — he found himself in a new emotional terrain: love. Not familial love. Not friendship love. Romantic love. The kind that disarms you, opens your chest, and exposes old wounds you thought had healed.
He was writing constantly, experimenting quietly on his own, until a chance meeting with Berlin producer duo KITSCHKRIEG brought everything into sharp focus. Together, they didn’t craft a theme — they uncovered one.
“Love became the thread,” he says simply. A thread that stitched the project into something whole.
Still, to understand the album is to understand where it came from and what came before it. The opening track samples the women’s choir from his mother’s church. She passed away years ago, but her presence and the ache of her absence still linger in his music like a ghost made of sunlight. “She was everyone’s definition of a good person,” he says, eyes softening. His father, meanwhile, carries a guilt he can’t quite set down. Forgiveness — real, uncomfortable forgiveness — became a deep emotional current running through the song.
The sample is in Hausa. It’s a prayer. A plea for the ability to forgive, even family. Recording it was an act of release; a spiritual pivot away from grief and into love. The kind of love that forces you to confront yourself. The kind that demands growth.
That spiritual grounding traces back to Kaduna — the city where he was raised. Unlike Lagos, Kaduna breathes differently: slower, calmer, devout. Its soundscape is a mix of church hymns, northern melodies, and honest silence. “It shaped everything,” he says. The distance from Lagos’ noise gave him room to dream — and to feel deeply.
Listening to Atonement, you hear a life in transition. You hear a young man mourning and mending. You hear love not as perfection, but process — clumsy, thrilling, terrifying. You hear cinema literally.
“I just wanted to write about love,” he shrugs. But what he’s made is something far richer: a sonic film about healing, desire, God, memory, and the ways we learn to hold each other without dropping ourselves.
