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Written By
Lucas Olateju
Jiire Smith is On a Journey
Jiire Smith was born into a home where music is a living practice, woven into his daily life. His mother, a literature professor and singer who had recorded a studio album, left an imprint that still runs through his songwriting.
By the time he turned thirteen, he had stepped into it fully, standing before a congregation to lead responsorial psalms during Mass. The setting calls for stillness, reverence and solemnity, without applause, but his voice often disrupted that order. “Every time I sang, you could hear people murmur, you could tell they were impressed,” he recalls.
“There was always this very thin line,” he says, “between respecting the church and appreciating somebody.”
By his final year in secondary school, he knew he wanted to pursue a career in music and leaned into it with structure, choosing to ground his passion in discipline by studying music at New York University Abu Dhabi. Whatever resistance that might have come with choosing music was softened by the fact that he approached it academically, with a full scholarship to match.
In Abu Dhabi, the edges of that plan began to show. The environment offered resources, but could not always provide the kind of creative community he needed. “I decided that I would try doing things myself, and I would not say that from the get go, everything was good or great, but I got better at producing by myself,” he admits.
What began as a workaround slowly became a method. Writing, producing and recording were not separate disciplines so much as parts of the same process, learned in isolation and refined over time.
Lagos and Abu Dhabi do not offer him the same things, and he has learned not to expect them to. In Abu Dhabi and Dubai, there are recording studios, live gigs that pay, and enough stability to keep building. Lagos offers something harder to invoice: proximity to a scene that mirrors the music he is making, and a kind of creative alignment that only seems to happen when he is home.
It shapes how he works. Moving between both places without fully settling into either has made him comfortable with things not resolving immediately, with staying in motion while something is still forming. That instinct became necessary when the work stopped moving.
“I was in a state where I felt like I was stagnant with music,” he says.
The music was not reaching people in the way he expected and the connections he was trying to build were not forming. The progress he had imagined did not match what he could see in front of him. Rather than continue in that state, he left. He packed a bag, flew to Kigali, and rented a small house on top of a hill.
What came out of that retreat became "Diamond in a Process”. The project did not arrive all at once. It took shape slowly, without any real sense of momentum. One of the last songs he wrote there was “Celebrate”, built around a set of questions that stayed with him: “Is this the future? Is it my best? Is this amazing? Is it going to last?”
The answer he arrived at was simpler. It doesn’t matter yet. Celebrate anyway.
The EP has seven tracks, and none of them arrived easily. The second track demanded more than the rest. “Is it fair”, the second song, sits at the edge of his comfort, an electronic pulse underneath a register he had not worked in before. He spent close to a month on the mix alone, shared it with producers looking for a second opinion, and when they couldn’t get back to him in time, he finished it himself.
“I feel it's still my favorite song, my favorite song, and I think it will have its time” he says
He still writes, produces and records his own music as a result of circumstance. Now, in Lagos, he is looking outward again, reaching out to creatives, building the kind of environment he did not have before.
He has dismissed the idea of separating these roles. He references it simply: “Beethoven composed. It was not a separate identity, just part of what the work required.” For him, it is the same.
That way of thinking extends to how he sees the industry. For Jiire, progress is rooted in growth and patience. Rather than chasing quick success, he focuses on refining his craft and developing steadily. He is independent, but not invested in independence as an idea in itself. The question, for him, is what allows the work to exist and travel. “The right structure does not take away from that. It supports it.” he says
He listens to Tems, to Olivia Dean, to Khalid, artists who seem to be working from a place that feels internal rather than reactive. That is the kind of work he is trying to make.
He is still finishing his degree. His days move between classes, meetings, and the quieter work of keeping things in motion. Some days are full. Others are deliberately not.
The movement between places will continue. Lagos when he needs proximity, the Gulf for stability.
“Diamond in a Process” is out, but he is still inside it. The work of putting it in front of people is ongoing. There is no urgency for what comes next.
“I’m really grateful for where I am today,” he says, “knowing what it cost to get here. I’m glad to pursue this career and honoured to serve music to people.”
