His Master of Ballads is a map for those who love quietly and hurt deeply—people who believe tenderness is still worth the trouble. Every note on this record is a hand extended into fog. When you take it, you realize —maybe we are all just trying to learn the same thing: how to stay soft without breaking.
There’s something almost defiant about a man who sings softly in a world obsessed with noise. Dwin has always known this — that restraint is its own rebellion, that tenderness isn’t weakness but the slowest form of endurance. His Master of Ballads album doesn’t shout for attention, instead it lingers, breathes and stands at the edge of intimacy saying, stay if you can listen.
When Edwin Madu — the man most people know as Dwin, The Stoic — dropped Master of Ballads in October 2024, it didn’t feel like just another album release. It felt like a quiet revelation, more like… A statement about what Nigerian-indie music could be, when it stops chasing trends and starts telling stories that actually mean something.
The 15-track project runs a lean 41 minutes, marking Dwin’s first solo outing since 2018’s Heavy Heart. But there’s nothing hesitant about it — this is the sound of someone who finally knows himself. The title — Master of Ballads — stems from a 2019 interview where a journalist casually called him “the emerging master of ballads”. Instead of shrugging it off, Dwin ‘locked’ in — not as staying trapped in, but as a doorway to explore what “a ballad” could mean in his own world. And he does explore, with the songs drifting through highlife, folk, alt-pop, and Afropop; each one shaped with quiet intention. Dwin’s longtime collaborator Rhaffy leads the production, with GRNDMSTR, LMBSKN, and Smasher adding texture around the edges. Together, they built a soundscape that feels gentle but assured — spacious enough for reflection and intimate enough to hold a listener’s gaze.
Before the strings come alive in Be Well, you’ve already quieted your pulse. There’s an unspoken pact: to enter Dwin’s world, you must bring your silence as an offering and listening is not for entertainment but for unravelling.
The Soft Weight of Words
Across the record, Dwin writes as if each line were a confession whispered into a pillow. Beside Me feels like a letter found in a drawer —folded too many times, written by someone who never intended to send it. There’s ache in his restraint, beauty in the hesitation between breaths. What Dwin achieves here is a kind of emotional architecture where he builds rooms out of memory, furnishes them with melody, and lets us wander barefoot through them. Every track feels lived in, but not overexplained. He’s the kind of songwriter who trusts the silence between syllables.
On Running, the guitar isn’t just an instrument, it’s a pulse; reminding us that movement sometimes hides exhaustion. Lindsey Abudei joins him here, and together they create something that feels less like a duet and more like two people running side by side, trying to outpace the same ghost. You see him: that quiet boy at the intersection of desire and guilt, running not toward peace, but from the fear of breaking open.
A Different Kind of Heroism
There’s something heroic about not giving up on gentleness. The project is a love letter to endurance—not the cinematic kind, but the small, invisible one that plays out in the human chest. Dwin doesn’t dramatize heartbreak; he dignifies it.
Next Time (Demo) is the kind of song that could have easily been overproduced but Dwin leaves it raw and unguarded. You can almost hear the studio light flickering while he records, as imperfection becomes the soul of this sound. Then comes Ifunanyam where he weaves English and Igbo not for cultural flair, but as an emotional necessity. It’s not bilingualism—it’s truth-seeking in two tongues. The word ifunanyam itself—my love—feels heavier when sung this way, as though the language itself bows to the feeling.
This is where Dwin’s genius hides – in his refusal to separate the personal from the cultural. He doesn’t make “Afro” music. He makes human music that just happens to be African.
The Craft of Stillness
If Master of Ballads were a movie, it would be shot entirely in soft focus; not because it’s unsure, but because it understands that clarity is sometimes unkind. I Go Nowhere and Steady are mid-tempo mirrors—songs about the desire to stay when everything around you urges flight. They’re about emotional stillness in a kinetic world. “I go nowhere,” he repeats, and the phrase becomes both a vow and a lament. You start to realize Dwin’s true instrument isn’t his voice, it’s his quiet. He knows when to hold back, when to let a line dissolve before it lands. Like Frank Ocean or Asa, he thrives in the sacred tension between what’s said and what’s left unsung.
In Hard Education featuring Ruka (the other half of Ignis Brothers), he takes the same reflective approach but moves toward self-confrontation. The line echoes like a mantra for an entire generation too tender for their own good. This is heartbreak redefined — not the cinematic kind, but the classroom kind: learning through loss, graduating into solitude.
Time, Money, and the Cost of Tenderness
Halfway through the album, Time Is Money breaks the serenity; not aggressively, but with a weary grin. It’s a song that understands adulthood as a transaction: between dreams and duty, art and survival. Dwin started freestyling this song at shows back in 2018. By the time it got its full production treatment in 2023, it had become something bigger than a freestyle—it became an anthem. The highlife influence here is unmistakable, and it’s no accident. Dwin is an Igbo man who loves writing love songs, and Time Is Money marries those two identities with infectious energy.
It’s a line that could have been cliché in another artist’s mouth, but Dwin wears it with irony. Because for him, love is currency — costly, fleeting, but always worth the risk. It’s here the album reveals its backbone: vulnerability as vocation. To love in 2025 is to work without pay — to show up, open-chested, in a world that rewards detachment.
Love Songs as Survival Songs
Every Dwin album has a moment where he lets you breathe; but here, he doesn’t. From “To You” (ft. Ogranya) to “Hold Me Now” (with Kate Bass), he keeps the you pinned gently, against emotional transparency. The arrangements are minimal—just enough to frame his voice, never enough to drown it. To You is where Dwin’s instinct as a collaborator shines. The guitar work leaves the song with some warmth and a generosity of spirit, balancing the album’s heavier moments. In Hold me now, he pleads; not to anyone in particular. It’s a cry into the void, a reach across emotional distances that streaming-era love has normalized.
The sequence that follows feels like the emotional apex of the album. Each track is an unspoken argument, the sound of two people failing to articulate the same grief in different languages.
Please Say Something captures the frustration of silence, of waiting for a response that doesn’t come. The production mirrors this tension, creating space that feels deliberately empty, uncomfortable. After all the complexity, all the storytelling, all the emotional ups and downs, this track suggests that maybe love doesn’t need to be explained or justified. It just is. There’s a maturity in this perspective, a sense of acceptance. And then Swan Song closes the record. At just 2 minutes and 38 seconds, it’s brief but complete. Like the intro, it’s a bookend, a moment to reflect on everything that’s come before. There’s a finality to it that feels earned. The Master of Ballads has told his story, and now it’s time to rest.
Between the Note and the Noise
The album was originally meant to be a series of singles dropped throughout the year. But as Dwin and his team compiled the project, they realized they had an album on their hands — the perfect album for this stage of his career. It’s a reintroduction, really. His debut Heavy Heart dropped in 2018, and while he’s been active since then—particularly with Ignis Brothers and the Love Lane EP with producer Rhaffy—he hasn’t had a solo album to point to.
Six years is a long time in music and Master of Ballads is Dwin’s way of saying: here’s who I am now, this is what I care about and here is what I can do. The album tells the story of a fictional character—the Master of Ballads himself—and his muse, navigating love, life, and grief. It’s ambitious storytelling, the kind that requires listeners to pay attention. And people have been paying attention. The sold-out show at the 1,000-seater Lagos’ MUSON Centre which preceded the album’s release, proved that.
The Stoic That Feels
The irony of Dwin’s name—The Stoic—isn’t lost on anyone. Stoicism, in its classical form, preaches detachment. But here, Dwin redefines it. His stoicism is not emotional distance; it’s emotional discipline. He doesn’t suppress his feelings, rather he frames them carefully, like glass sculptures that could shatter if you breathe too hard. This is the Dwin that has been forming across the years—from Heavy Heart to Love Lane, from The Cost of Our Lives (with Ignis Brothers, called one of the best Nigerian albums of 2020) to now. Each project has been a rehearsal in becoming softer without dissolving. In Master of Ballads, he reaches the summit of that pursuit. He isn’t merely performing emotion; he’s documenting it. He sings not because he wants to be understood but because he needs to survive the feeling itself. And maybe that’s what mastery really means—not control, but coexistence with chaos.
The album also benefits from the virality of Streets which went viral in 2024 despite being released in 2022. That song taught Dwin something important: you can build your viral moment. Good music finds its people, even in a crowded marketplace. Master of Ballads feels like an album made with that confidence.
The Listener’s Mirror
In an era where streaming favors spectacle, Dwin chooses sincerity. In a music scene obsessed with hooks, he builds havens. You don’t play his music at parties—you play it in transit, between homes, between heartbreaks, when silence feels too loud.
To listen to Master of Ballads is to remember that music isn’t just heard—it’s inhabited. Dwin doesn’t craft tracks for virality or algorithms. He crafts worlds—small, breathable, humane. He reminds us that ballads aren’t relics—they’re blueprints for feeling. They are how we return to ourselves after the world has shouted us hoarse. When the album ends, what lingers isn’t the melody—it’s the mood. You feel lighter, yes, but also seen.
Listen to Master of Ballads like it’s a mirror—because somewhere in its silence, you might hear yourself breathing again.
Tell us:
- Which track hit you hardest?
- What moment made you stop and rewind?
What’s your Master of Ballads moment? We’re listening.
