Saszy Afroshii On “GET MONI,” production as self

expression, and why the future of African music might be stranger than we expect.

There is a particular kind of confidence in making something that refuses to explain itself.

For Saszy Afroshii, that confidence sounds like grit, distortion, rhythm and a little bit of chaos. The award-winning Nigerian producer, whose credits include Wizkid, Tiwa Savage, Didi B, Qing Madi and Reekado Banks, has spent years shaping records from behind the scenes. Now, with her latest single, “GET MONI,” featuring Major AJ, she is making the distinction between producer and artist increasingly difficult to ignore.

Released August 12 via The Orchard, “GET MONI” is playful, assured and deliberately uncomplicated. It is a song about wanting more, chasing it and enjoying yourself while you do. But beneath its feel-good energy is something more revealing: a producer becoming increasingly comfortable treating sound as her own language.

“I think I’ve always seen production as self-expression,” Saszy says. “But over time I became more confident in understanding that my sound is a voice too.”

That confidence is audible in the way she describes the record. “GET MONI” isn’t simply another instrumental handed to an artist. Saszy wanted to put more of herself into it — the energy, the textures, the attitude. The result is a record that feels less like a backdrop and more like a world she has built.

It is a perspective shaped by growing up in Nigeria, where music is almost impossible to experience in isolation.

“You’re surrounded by so many sounds without even realizing it,” she says. Her generation grew up moving between Fela, American pop, hip-hop, electronic music and everything in between. Rather than seeing those influences as competing identities, Saszy sees them as permission to remain sonically restless.

That restlessness is important to her.

African music, she argues, does not need to obey a fixed sonic definition simply because it is African. Warmth and rhythm can exist alongside aggression, darkness, distortion and attitude. The point, for her, is not to reject the familiar but to make room for the unexpected.

“I like creating sounds that make you pause and wonder what you just heard,” she says.

It is perhaps why she resists the idea of production as merely instrumental work. For Saszy, the producer is not simply responsible for constructing the beat. Production can shape emotion, arrangement, performance and the very world a song inhabits.

“I see myself as an artist in my own right, and production is my instrument.”

That philosophy begins before the first sound is even made. When Saszy enters a studio with an artist, the first thing she listens for isn’t necessarily their voice or even their musical ability. It is their personality.

“I want to understand who I’m sitting with before I think about what the song should sound like,” she says.

From there, production becomes an exercise in translation: taking something intangible about an artist and building a sonic world around it.

With “GET MONI,” that world is deliberately light on its feet. There is ambition in the song, but no desperation. Wanting more does not have to mean losing the ability to enjoy the present.

“I think that’s actually the beauty of being young and African today,” Saszy says. “We can be ambitious and hungry for more without taking ourselves too seriously.”

That tension — ambition without solemnity — feels particularly relevant to a generation raised between worlds. African youth culture is increasingly global, but Saszy isn’t interested in the idea that global recognition requires convergence.

Her collaborations have only reinforced that belief.

“African music doesn’t have one future,” she says. “There are so many different directions we can go in.”

For her, the exciting possibility is not finding one definitive sound that represents Africa to the rest of the world. It is allowing many sounds to exist at once, confidently and without forcing them into an international template.

That same freedom is what she wants more of from the music industry now: experimentation and honesty.

“We’ve proven that African music can be global, so now I want us to be fearless.”

Perhaps that is the real idea behind “GET MONI.” Beneath the bounce and bravado is a much larger proposition about what African music can become when its creators stop worrying about whether the result makes sense to everyone else.

“African music doesn’t have one future There are so many different directions we can go in.”

Saszy wants producers to take up more space. She sees them becoming artists, curators and creative directors — people whose sonic decisions can influence culture just as powerfully as the artists whose names appear on the cover.

And if her generation is remembered through the music, it leaves behind, she hopes the record tells a story of people who were hungry, curious and unapologetically themselves.

“We were influenced by the entire world but still connected to where we came from,” she says. “I hope they hear experimentation and freedom.”

For Saszy Afroshii, that freedom sounds less like a destination than an invitation: to distort the edges, cross the boundaries and make something strange enough to make somebody stop and listen.

Maybe African music doesn’t need to decide what it is next.

Maybe it just needs to get weirder