Growing up in Benin City, Kelly Bran was crazy about music. He’d listen to songs for hours, reciting the lyrics, eager to create his own.

Though he harbored the dream, his early activities as part of the local music culture came in the form of performances. Bars, hotels, parties –it didn’t matter for Kelly Bran as long as he got to perform. Along with his best friend, a rapper named Austin, Kelly would dance and sing at these spaces, earning little cash and largely doing it for the love of everything music.

Now 22 years old, Kelly Bran is currently making waves in the Nigerian music scene. He’s stayed behind the scene years back, bidding his time and undergoing some crucial artistic development. While he waited, the ‘Afrobeats to the World’ mantra filtered into international spaces, with musicians like Wizkid, Davido and Burna Boy becoming global superstars. Most recently, Burna Boy won the Grammy Award for ‘Best New Album,’ a feat which greatly inspired Kelly Bran in his journey for pop stardom.

His recently released single, a song titled “20 Years” which features Hotkid, one of the promising talents in the music industry, is currently dominating the airwaves. His vocals are sunny, riding the beat with a youthful energy which will be familiar to fans of Afrobeats royalty, Wizkid. On his part, Hotkid relishes the opportunity to make some deserved brags, referencing his hit record “Ozana”’ in one of those.

With his career off to a promising start, Kelly Bran looks back at his family life, knowing he’s been sowing the seeds for a long time. Born to engineer parents, he was fortunate that unlike a majority of child performers, his parents supported his creative ambitions. And even more than just support, they contributed actively towards it, playing the first songs Kelly loved and would get acquainted with in the years to come. For his father, these songs included a mix of indigenous music and mainstream sounds. A memory that still stays with Kelly is the ubiquity of D’Banj’s “Fall in Love,” a song he nostalgically breaks into this Lagos afternoon.

We’re surprised when Kelly Bran affirms that his father is indeed a fan of Naira Marley. Himself, when asked who some of his favorite artists were, it wasn’t surprising he mentioned the duo of DaGrin and Olamide. Both rappers are considered the honchos of street rap, laying the hustle-loyalty-respect credo by which a section of mainstream pop will be judged in the years preceding the 2010s. He’s also a fan of the older school: given his father’s love for D’Banj, it isn’t out of place that he loves the entire Mo Hits crew, and he name checks Don Jazzy and Wande Coal, both artists who are much around till this day.

Surely, like those artists he admires, Kelly Bran is plotting for longevity in the music business. He recognizes the potential in playing the long game and knows he’ll have to play it with as much grace he can muster. Already he’s been hard at work, conceptualizing ideas, writing songs and recording them. He’s now based in Lagos, influenced each day by the alluring and contrasting lifestyles the country’s entertainment center has to offer.

He’s working on his forthcoming project which is titled Welcome to Reality. It’s a fitting title for all he’s experienced in the recent past. He reveals to us that the project will have “different characters,” a cryptic assertion we take to mean that he’s reaching for newer sonic terrains, playing with form or the stories he tells. He also revealed that the project will have five songs.

There’s no further information on the forthcoming work but Kelly Bran is quite confident it will see release in the latter periods of the year. “I’ve been working,” he vows confidently as we near the end of our discussion. For now, listeners can stream the Hotkid-assisted “20 Years.”