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Written By
Folake Ajao
Everything About Töme Is Intentional
Töme was born in Montreal, raised in Ontario, and spent enough of her childhood shuttling between Canada and Lagos that neither place ever felt entirely foreign. Her parents were present and deliberate, the kind who made a point of showing their four children the world from a young age. She attended a francophone Catholic school straight through to the end of high school, further solidifying her knowledge of the French language. She has since relocated to Lagos, trading the life she built in Canada for one she is still building here, and the movement between worlds has become a defining characteristic of how she operates.
Music was in the house before she was old enough to choose it. Her father was a professional percussionist and her grandmother an opera singer, and it was her father who introduced her to it early, pulling back the curtain on something that would eventually become everything. By eight years old she already knew, in whatever way children know things before they have the language to explain them, that she was going to be an entertainer. That certainty never wavered. In 2016 she started making music with a friend, formed a group, and began finding her footing in studios. The process was new and uncertain, the sounds still rough, the sense of self still forming, but the direction was not in question. “I knew that I was 100% going to pursue this seriously by then,” she says. Some people spend years talking themselves into a decision she had already made as a child.
The name started as Oluwatomi, her full name, before she made a small adjustment that changed its entire feel. She swapped the I for an E, and Töme was born. A minor edit on paper, but the kind of creative instinct that signals how an artist thinks about identity and presentation, finding something already yours and shaping it into something that lands differently.
Her early days in the industry were not gradual. She went straight into performing on massive stages alongside Wizkid, Mr Eazi, and Burna Boy, a baptism that could have been overwhelming and instead turned out to be clarifying. “It was definitely an eye opener to a whole different level of the industry,” she says, “but it was amazing and it taught me so much and allowed me to really shape myself into a performing artist.” There was no slow climb through small rooms, no years spent building toward a moment. She learned by standing where the standard was already high, by watching how artists who had done it for years carried themselves on stage and off it, and absorbing what she could. The experience compressed what might have taken much longer into something immediate and permanent.
Her recent single “French Tips” came out of a session with ATG that was very spontaneous. They were in the studio going through beats when one came on and she felt pulled toward a different approach, something looser and more playful than she might otherwise reach for. The beat had already been named “French Tips,” which she found fitting enough to lean into. “It was cute,” she says. There was no extended creative process, no mood boards or reference tracks, just an instinct followed through. The aesthetic around it did not require much engineering either. She describes herself as a fusion artist who loves to experiment, and this was one of those records where the sound found its own shape without being forced into one. “There wasn’t really much thought,” she says. “It was natural.”
That naturalness is consistent with how she approaches her work more broadly. She is closely involved in the visual side of everything she puts out, to the point where the creative direction typically begins with her. The broader vision comes from her first, and collaborators are brought in to execute and expand on what she has already imagined. It is a pattern that reflects something deeper about how she thinks about her artistry, not as a product being developed by a team around her, but as an expression that starts from the inside and works its way outward. “It’s mainly my initial input that brings the vision to life,” she says.
That same self-directed instinct extends to how she is approaching her sound right now. She has been deliberately stepping back from other people’s music, creating a kind of intentional distance from influence so that what emerges from her is genuinely her own. It is a discipline that not many artists have the confidence to practise, particularly at a stage where the temptation to absorb and reflect what is already working in the industry is strongest. “I’ve been in this phase where I’m not really listening to anyone else,” she says, “so I can truly discover what comes from me naturally.” The result is an artist in active conversation with herself, testing the boundaries of her own instincts rather than borrowing from someone else’s.
It is a posture that makes sense for someone who has been building toward this with intention since childhood. The francophone schooling, the back and forth between continents, the early exposure to percussion and opera in the home, the jump straight onto major stages without a transitional period, all of it has produced an artist with an unusually wide frame of reference and an equally unusual level of self-possession. Töme does not seem to be figuring out who she is. She seems to be in the process of revealing it, on her own terms and at her own pace.
Where it goes from here is still being written. The sound will keep growing, she says, and she will keep evolving with it. There is no fixed destination named, no target sound or demographic she is aiming for. Just a commitment to the process and a trust in what comes out of it. For someone who has been certain about this path since she was eight years old, that is less a plan than a statement of fact. The music will go where she goes, and she is still moving.
