Masego

When: 19th February 2024
Location: O2 Academy

Masego returns to the UK February 2024. Coming to Glasgow’s O2 Academy on 19th February 2024.

“Seeing Ed Sheeran make a beat from scratch when I was in college changed my life,” Masego told GQ in 2019. Just two years earlier, a video of the songwriter and multi-instrumentalist live-looping his own tracks with FKJ on Tadow went viral – inspiring a whole new generation of wannabe musicians watching from dorm rooms around the world.

Described as “the sound of the future”, legacy always seems to be on Masego’s mind. Born Micah Davis to a US Air Force father, Masego spent his childhood bouncing from base to base, picking up musical influences from a dozen different sources. Teaching himself to play the drums, then the piano, then the saxophone, he surrounded himself with vinyl records and listened to everyone from John P. Kee and Cab Calloway to Andre 3000.  

Improvising free jazz saxophone over sampled beats, and learning to live-loop like a pro, Masego honed his unique sound over a string of steadily maturing online tracks that quickly earned him a cult fanbase. In 2015 he collaborated with Medasin on The Pink Polo EP, including the single Girls That Dance, before his work on Tadow with FKJ in 2017 won him major international attention (and more than half a billion views on TikTok).  

Debut album Lady Lady followed in 2018, confounding music critics everywhere as they struggled to define his disparate sound – with no two songs on the record sounding alike amid swirling woodwind jazz, classic R&B and retro-futurist bass drums. Labelling his own style as “TrapHouseJazz”, Masego describes his sound as “ignorance meeting eloquence”. 

In 2020, Masego released his third EP, Studying Abroad, as a wry concept piece framed around the ups and downs of a broken relationship. The following year, he contributed a track to the companion soundtrack album to the Oscar winning political drama, Judas And The Black Messiah.

In March 2023 Masego released his eponymous second studio album, another silky smooth work that featured ‘What You Wanna Try,’ ‘You Never Visit Me’ and ‘Black Anime.’

Following a collaboration with Toian and IzyBeats with ‘Tipsy,’ in October 2023 Masego announced UK dates for February 2024, including performances at Manchester’s O2 Apollo and London’s Alexandra Palace.