Following more than a year of relentlessly teasing his sophomore album INDUSTRY MACHINE, on Monday, Odumodublvck announced its release date: Friday, September 26,2025. The announcement video opens with a close-up shot of a palm-sized wooden cross. The camera zooms out to reveal Odumodublvck situated in a junk yard resembling somewhere in Alaba Market. He wears a dark leather jacket, dark shades, and his signature red, black, and white Okpu Agu hat. Jutting out of the left side of the frame are scrap car parts colored red, white, and black respectively. The tiny cross calls out from the background.
Later in the video, as he trudges through the dingy scrap yard, doting fans spring up and baste him in praises. The iconography here is potent and unmissable, alluding to the motley cocktail of influences that underpins his music and brand: smoldering machismo, street credibility, and Christianity.
In 2023, slowly but surely, Odumodublvck went from provincial acclaim to becoming one of the most prolific artists in West Africa. After a blistering run of singles including Picanto, Dog Eat Dog II featuring Cruel Santino and Bella Shmurda, the Fireboy-assisted FIREGUN, and Declan Rice, he released his debut album Eziokwu. The album foregrounded his predilection for traditional Igbo music and alchemized Highlife, Afrobeats, Drill, and Trap into an intoxicating blend. Almost entirely delivered in Nigerian Pidgin and generously festooned with an array of distinctively Nigerian slangs and themes, the album was met with rapturous praise upon release.
Through Eziokwu Odumodublvck conjured the philosopher’s stone was conjured that had eluded many of his predecessors. The album miraculously blends sultry melodies with gritty rap, it embraces local influences and traditions but maintains a global appeal. In Eziokwu, Odumodublvck slinks between a loverboy persona and that of a battle-hardened gangster. The album is perhaps best described as an array of contradictions which, somehow, coalesce beautifully. With some 326 million streams on Spotify, the album is significantly the most successful Hip Hop album of recent times. For context, Olamide’s most-streamed album Carpe Diem has about 262 million streams on Spotify.
Eziokwu reshaped the Nigerian Hip Hop landscape and injected new life into the scene. But it also left some people—critics, fellow rappers, and Hip Hop enthusiasts, unnerved, indignant, and resistant to the flavor of Hip Hop he heralded. “He’s not even rapping,” has become a refrain among those who seek to undermine him or are at odds with his style of hip-hop. Indeed, it was the main line of attack deployed by BlaqBonez who recently feuded with Odumodublvck, deriding his style of rap through tweets and a diss track called Everlasting Taker, and on another track titled Go Crazy.
In a recent episode of the podcast Ada’s Room, Odumodublvck rails against his antagonists with a series of pointed assertions: “When Wizkid said Hip Hop was dead, it was dead”; “I’m the only Nigerian rapper that has sold out a show in Canada but ‘I cannot rap?’ So what is it that you guys are rapping?”; “You rap purists—that’s what they call themselves—you come out with “bars” but nobody knows your bars, the kids, they don’t recite your bars, but they recite our bars.”
In the weeks leading up to INDUSTRY MACHINE’s release, Odumodublvck’s narrative has increasingly assumed a fractious complexion. His promotional antics at the start of the year mostly amounted to whimsical tweets, which he’d sign off with “THE MACHINE IS COMING!” Today, he’s alternating between railing against extant enemies and would-be ones. These days, his motto appears to be “If you like gym, Odumo go pull up with him pim, burst your muscle, burst your bubble”—a line from his latest single, 2:02 pm in London, in which he derides Blaqbonez’ recent decision to embrace the gym. He frequently signs off on tweets with the phrase. Fans, in turn, have caught on and make whimsical videos around that line from the song.
It’s a rare and spectacular occurrence for an album to come on the heels of a charged narrative. INDUSTRY MACHINE provides one such moment. His haters would be overjoyed to see him flop. By contrast, his fans keenly await another epochal album. The air is tense with anticipation and one can only wonder if Odumudublvck’s much-anticipated album will live up to its hype.
