A little over a year ago, Ruger announced his separation from Jonzing World, the Mavin-affiliated record label that discovered him, named him, and published the many rapturous hits of his four-year career. ‘Blown Boy’ was to be the tagline of his next era, encapsulating his larger-than-life consideration of himself that was founded on his real-life wins—in the last few years, he has had numerous singles reach national virality and performed in venues around the world. He had ‘blown’, a word used to describe that intangible yet unmissable moment when an artist becomes a star.
While BlownBoy Ru seems like a very premature victory lap for an artist this early in his career, Ruger deems it important to remind his detractors that he has lived up to his lofty talk in such a short time. For an artist whose debut EP contained proclamatory anthems like Ruger and self-aggrandizing declarations like Bow, watching his words grow less outrageous with each win has been ecstatic.
BlownBoy Ru follows 2023’s Ru The World, the glistening multicultural debut album that, while being too voluptuous in theme, was a brilliant exposition of Ruger’s Dancehall parentage. His fourth project in four years, BlownBoy Ru holds all the parts of Ruger that have made him distinctive, for better and worse. He still wants to sleep with other people’s girlfriends, an extension of a worldview that frames sex as a trophy and the woman as the losing opponent; he clings to a cocky, outsized belief in himself; he continues to favor Dancehall and Reggae as his unique sonic conduit in a world that prefers Afropop.
What BlownBoy Ru tries to incorporate, in addition, is a soft, slow RnB side not often seen from Ruger. It allows him to employ his silky voice in a way he has hardly explored, over gentle melodies that emit as much genuine-sounding emotion as he’s ever offered. Most of these tracks are tucked in the second half of the album, in that run between Wish You Well and Runaway where he tells a relatable, mostly cohesive tale of a relationship’s last days. Toro, one of the brightest and best-produced songs, first reveals these cracks, with Ruger eager to mend them: “Truly I vex you, but try forgive me.” On Runaway he’s a lot less optimistic of reconciliation—“Now I’m feeling like/ Me baby I can’t cope/ Me thinking we can’t float no more”—before guest singer Haile takes over on a well-taken chorus: “May be better you runaway / Cuh the problem’s when you stay.” Finally, Wish You Well offers a mature, amicable goodbye, with a hint of animosity that conveys finality: “I fear that you will circle back to moi when your eye clear, gyal/ You’ll be joking if you thinking I’ll be here or near.”
These songs, while attempting to refashion Ruger’s writing for good, lose the exuberance with which he animated previous work, particularly his debut album, which was a high-energy affair nearly from start to finish. Expectedly, the best tracks on BlownBoy Ru are the bounciest, derived from various genres, whether he’s enticing a lover to bed on the Dancehall earworm Dudu (on which Kranium finely guest stars), crafting a money-flashing Drill track on Giveaway, where Zlatan reiterates his Rap credibilities with a stellar verse, or asserting his uniqueness on Toma Toma, a Tiwa Savage–featuring jam that draws from Brazilian Funk, Afrobeats’ shiny new accessory.
For all his profligacy, Ruger remains an excellent lyricist and storyteller, only underestimated because his stories are often built on carnal, toxic scenes, like his depiction of a brazen cheating boyfriend on Girlfriend, or his blatant commodification of women on Nine or Ilashe (with BNXN), for which he came under heavy fire. Jay Jay, his Valentine day release that pays homage to Okocha (a gesture the footballer is unlikely to acknowledge), also attracted controversy. It followed its very first lines— “If a girl worry me, I delete her/ Put her inside the bin bag”—which were thought to allude to femicide, but considering the previous evidence of Ruger’s work, probably fall into the “lesser evil” of female objectification. And these are not even the song’s worst lines: he preludes his chorus with “As you can see, you need plan B/ Pregnancy is not for me,” referencing an unsafe culture in which men pressure women to use emergency contraceptives under threat of abandonment.
It is a waste of Ruger’s talents that he continually puts his skill to the most irritating topics. His breakout EP exhibited traces of it—“Bounce your body or we bounce you out”— but it was fair to assume these tendencies would mature by some combination of personal growth and executive oversight. On the contrary, he’s become rather worse—even now, his music concerts have nearly become adult content. It means that any consideration of his artistry will continually evoke themes of objectification, sexism, and toxic masculinity.
BlownBoy Ru attempts to steer him in the right direction, and while its selection of softer-toned RnB songs do help, he has juxtaposed them against songs presumably written earlier, making for an uneven mix, sometimes on the same track: Muah (Soulmates) can sound like a real lover’s ballad or fuckboy anthem on different verses. The album also offers the swashbuckling side of Ruger, the one that powered tracks like Bow and Champion from his first two EPs, though it is given comparatively less airtime here, mostly confined to BlownBoy Ru’s intro (REintroduction) and outro (BlownBoy Anthem). They show that his record label travails and the uncertainty that followed have hardly affected his self-confidence. But these songs too suffer from a lack of focus: on BlownBoy Anthem, the supposed manifesto to his new era, he abandons his subject halfway to reveal his sexual preferences; “Ghosted a girl coz she can’t suck D/ Beforе I fuck I love my thing sloppy.” When he returns a few lines after with a thinly-veiled remark on ex–label boss D’Prince—“I denounce every loyalty to some godfather/ This year I’m about me”—it doesn’t hit nearly as hard as it should. This lack of focus may also point to a lack of oversight over his creative process. His debut album was executive produced by former label boss D’Prince; it is unclear who, if anybody, sits in that capacity for BlownBoy Ru—an understated drawback of self-owned labels.
For its cohesion, Hell Cat, the penultimate track, makes for the more relevant anthem. Ruger pictures himself as a “Hellcat on a free road,” one of those models of high-performance Dodge cars famed for blistering speed and incredible horsepower. He points to global tours, a stocked garage, and, of course, women around the world as markers of his growing status. With the renewed sense of ownership and independence a self-owned label provides, coupled with the songwriting talent he brims with, the sky’s the limit for Ruger in the next few years. The major obstacles in his way will be those he set for himself: with his worrisome and tired views on women and sex, and the inconsistency that results when he tries to place them side-by-side with something that resembles genuine affection. These, too, are the chief drawbacks of BlownBoy Ru, and unlike his debut album from two years ago, the music is not good enough to overlook serious thematic flaws.
