The second album.

Tiana Okoye had been thinking about this problem for two years before she wrote the issue. The second-album problem is not really about music — though the examples run through Burna Boy, Marvin Gaye, and Radiohead after The Bends — it is about what it means to make something after you have already made the thing that defined you.

The breakthrough establishes a signature. The second work must decide whether to repeat or refuse it. Neither choice is safe. Repetition is artistically inert; refusal risks losing the audience the first work built. The issue was, in Tiana’s telling, about artists who found a third way — not repetition, not rejection, but continuation under pressure.

This was the first issue edited primarily from Lagos. The regional accent is present but not programmatic.