Nonso Amadi released the Free EP on August 9, 2019. This is a catalogue project, framed as catalogue: nothing here is new, and the record still matters because it is the closing statement of his first run, the six songs he left behind before stepping away for close to three years, and the bridge between the self-produced breakthrough of “Tonight” and the five-label debut album that followed in 2023.
The official video for “No Crime,” embedded below, is carried on Amadi’s own channel. The song began life as a single in 2018 and became the EP’s lead record, and its place in the project is below.
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Six Songs, Named In Full
Apple Music’s listing for the EP gives the full suite: “Never” at 1:38, “Better” featuring Simi at 3:13, “Free” at 4:32, “No Crime” at 3:43, “Go Outside” featuring Mr Eazi at 3:13, and “What Makes You Sure?” at 3:07, six songs in 19 minutes in all, released under his own name in 2019. Apple frames the set plainly, noting that Simi and Mr Eazi join what it calls the Afrofusion artist’s romantic new suite, and that framing is accurate about the record’s centre of gravity: five of the six songs are love songs, and the sixth, the opener, is about why the singer needed to make the record on his own terms at all.
The release-day reading in Zikoko names the theme from the title itself: free suggests liberty or release, to no longer be confined or imprisoned. On “Never,” the opener, that liberty is the subject, a short declaration before the romance starts. The title track then does the project’s most restless work, starting as an airy R and B song before lifting into a more melodious Afro-swing turn. Sequencing is the argument here. The EP does not open with its biggest single or its biggest guest. It opens with a statement of intent, then earns the love songs that follow.
Two Guests, Two Different Signals
The guest list is small and deliberate. On “Better,” Simi joins for a stripped down ballad about making effort in a relationship, the two voices trading the work of a couple trying to do right by each other. On “Go Outside,” Mr Eazi brings the opposite energy, a dynamic Afrobeats record where Amadi plays the assured figure rather than the delicate lover who closes the EP on “What Makes You Sure?,” a plea for a lover’s trust. Zikoko’s review credits co-producers Juls and Spax among the team behind that range, and the range is the point: within 19 minutes the EP moves from confession to ballad to dancefloor and back to a question it does not answer.
“No Crime” holds the middle for a reason. AllMusic’s biography records that the song, released in 2018 ahead of the EP, raised his profile further in advance of Free, following the 2017 Eugy collaboration “Kwasia” and the War EP with Odunsi The Engine the same year. By the time the EP collected it, “No Crime” was already a playlist staple, a love song with the polish of a single and the patience of an album track. Placing it fourth, after the title track, lets the EP peak late rather than early. The breakthrough single itself is broken down in our reading of the “Tonight” lyric.
The Break That Followed
What gives Free its weight now is what happened next: nothing, for a long stretch, by design. After the EP, Amadi stepped away from social media and paused releasing music to go deeper into his artistry, and he did not return until “Foreigner” in February 2022. AllMusic’s summary of that arc is compact: after breaking through globally with “Tonight” in 2016, he found continued success through the rest of the decade with widely streamed tracks including “Radio,” “Go Outside” and “Emergency,” then issued his long-awaited debut album in 2023. A VEVO DSCVR Artists To Watch profile later put a number on the first run, recording more than 100 million streams across platforms by 2020, with Free named as the project that fuelled the fire and “No Crime” and “What Makes You Sure?” singled out for their lyrical honesty.
Heard that way, the EP is a pause button pressed at exactly the right height. It consolidated a sound, proved he could carry a project with only two guests, and left a closing track that asks a question, which is a fitting shape for a record made by an artist about to disappear to work out his next answer. That answer, when it came, is revisited in our return to When It Blooms.
Released on August 9, 2019, Free remains Nonso Amadi’s most concise statement: six songs, 19 minutes, two guests, one theme stated in its title, and the last word from the first chapter of a career that resumed stronger than it paused.
