Angelique Kidjo

Since Angélique Kidjo first burst onto the global scene over four decades ago, her music has provided a powerful transmission of pure unfettered joy. In the last few years alone, the Africa-born artist has amassed a host of accolades proving her immense cultural impact, including winning the 2023 Polar Music Prize, landing on Time’s illustrious 100 Most Influential People list, and taking home a Grammy for Best Global Music Album for 2021’s Mother Nature (a feat that earned her Guinness World Record for most Global Music Album awards won at the Grammys, with five prizes to date). On HOPE!!, Kidjo offers up a revelatory body of work affirming her as a truly essential artist—one whose unbridled joy serves as a unifying force, a conduit for healing, and a much-needed antidote to despair in troubled times. The 18th album in her widely acclaimed discography, HOPE!! pushes forward with the generation-spanning collaborative approach Kidjo previously embraced on Mother Nature—an album that featured a stacked lineup of young artists from genres like Afrobeat, dancehall, and hip-hop and quickly drew praise from the likes of Pitchfork (who lauded it as “a feast of the most sublime sounds found in the Black diaspora”) and The New Yorker (who noted that “Angélique Kidjo is a towering figure of cross-cultural music”). Dedicated to Kidjo’s late mother, HOPE!! emerged from a period shaped by grief and renewal.