ELIKIA Names His New Single After the Career He Left Behind

ELIKIA arrives at music with a biography most debut artists do not have. Before this, he played professional football, and his new single is called ‘Baller’. The title does not pretend the two lives are unrelated.

The track lands ahead of his debut album, ‘First Of A Kind’, scheduled for 20 November. That is a familiar setup, and not an especially comfortable one: the athlete-turned-musician is a well-worn route, and a good number of those records arrive sounding like a side project with a budget behind it.

What is worth noting here is the choice to name the song after the earlier career instead of quietly moving past it. Football is treated as material rather than as something to be outrun, which at least implies ELIKIA knows what he is drawing from. Plenty of artists in his position spend their first release avoiding the comparison. He has put it in the title.

None of that settles whether the music holds up, and the single alone will not answer that. A debut album is where the claim gets tested, and ‘First Of A Kind’ now carries the weight of a fairly direct statement of intent.

‘Baller’ is out now. ‘First Of A Kind’ follows on 20 November.