“Without hope, there is no love, there is no perseverance, there is no plan for the future,” Angélique Kidjo tells Apple Music’s Africa Now Radio about the title of her first solo album since 2021’s Mother Nature. “We need hope at every moment of the day, in the life we are living.” That outlook has served as a mantra for Kidjo across more than two dozen albums and a four-decade career, and on the acclaimed singer’s HOPE!!, it functions as a guiding framework. Kidjo frames joy as something wrested from difficulty, while Afrobeats superstar Davido redirects it outward. “Come dey with me, living lavishly,” he sings on “Joy.” On “Big Heart,” Kidjo sharpens her message through repetition and variation: “When they go cruel, you know I go kind/When they go low, you know I go high.” Michelle Obama’s signature phrase is not just quoted but paired with a counterpoint, extending its moral and strategic reach through coinages such as “kindness is a bulletproof vest.” On “Superwoman,” Kidjo sings in Yorùbá and Fon while Dadju answers in French and Lingala, the track passing through languages before settling into an English hook. What might register as mismatch instead resolves as cohesion, a multilingual braid held in rhythmic check. In addition to original material, Kidjo retools songs that have come to function as standards. Miriam Makeba’s “Malaika” is reimagined through a classical orchestral arrangement, assisted by Florent Pagny. The original “Jerusalema,” by Master KG and Nomcebo Zikode, is driven by a clipped kick, handclap, and looping vocal refrain. Subsequent versions, including Burna Boy’s, retain this percussive core. Kidjo’s take moves in the opposite direction, stripping the groove back to a light timekeeping frame and replacing it with swelling strings and plaintive piano lines that rise toward a cinematic crescendo. Highlife revivalists The Cavemen. helm two tracks, “I’m On Fire” and “Nadi Balance.” On the former, they rework the disciplined horn structures and militarized groove of “Zombie,” itself shaped by Tony Allen’s idiosyncratic approach. On the latter, which features Fally Ipupa, Kidjo and her producers link West African highlife and Central African soukous, most tellingly through the plinking, high-pitched electric guitar lines characteristic of soukous (and its extension into ndombolo). On “Oyaya,” featuring Nile Rodgers and IZA, Kidjo returns to the chant-driven energy of her 2019 tribute album Celia, building from a muted piano opening into a fuller Afrobeat-inflected arrangement. The groove draws on the cyclical drive associated with Femi Kuti’s “Beng Beng Beng,” while Rodgers’ guitar assumes the role traditionally held by horns. The refrain “Oyaya,” then, functions as a layered term spanning joy, urgency, and invocation. The result is a series of recombinations that hold both invention and inheritance high.