Brymo: How rumoured affair with Annie Idibia affected my 9th album

Olawale Ashimi, Nigerian singer better known as Brymo, says addressing his rumoured affair with Annie Idibia “created sudden hurt” for his 9th album.

The musician spoke when he featured on the latest episode of Afrobeats Intelligence, a podcast hosted by Joey Akan, the music journalist.

In October last year, the 35-year-old singer had in a lengthy rant claimed that 2Baba “falsely” accused him of sleeping with his wife.

Brymo also alleged that he was attacked by men loyal to the Afrobeats star over reasons not precisely established.

In his reaction, 2Baba, through his lawyers, had described Brymo’s claims as false and threatened to seek N1 billion in damages.

During the podcast, the ‘Ara’ crooner said he tried to put up with the allegation for about two years before eventually taking the matter to the public.

The singer, however, said his decision to open up a few weeks after he released ‘9’ — his ninth studio album — affected the success of the project.

Brymo said seeing his streams for the project shrinking over the allegation left him hurt at the time even though it was a necessary move to put the rumours to bed.

“There’s another case of me being accused of sleeping with someone’s wife (Annie Idibia) and that was huge. That was ridiculous…oh my God, I carried that for maybe two years and just went on to organise chaos because I couldn’t take it anymore,” he said.

“Surprisingly, we just dropped ‘9’ and everything was going fine…first week (after release) we had millions of streams on Apple Music and it was good.

“Then, I tweeted and my streams went down. Though I tweeted it, I still felt hurt. Addressing it created sudden hurt in my progress but it was necessary to end it there and then. Now the streams are getting better again. I was being politically incorrect to be correct.”

The singer also recounted how he dealt with a similar situation in 2020 when a lady accused him of sexual assault.

Brymo said he had to release ‘Libel’, his extended play (EP) to address the allegation.

“In fact I had to speak up, I had to go to the extent of making an album called ‘Libel’, just to address it, so I could seal it up and put it in the archives,” he added.