Top Songs of 2025: Kenya

Apple Music’s end-of-year charts are based on plays between November 1, 2024, and October 31, 2025. Anyone paying attention to Kenyan music in 2025 could tell you that it was a year when the scene’s frontline acts led the charge. Respected hip-hop duo BURUKLYN BOYZ expanded the scope of their drill-influenced catalog on highlights “Confession” and “Twende Nayo,” while Nyashinski continued his resurgence with deft lyrical displays across his album Yariasu. R&B acquired a new edge through the layered offerings of Njerae and Maya Amolo, singers whose textured expressions of desire and longing birthed highlights “Hypnotize” and “Hollon”, respectively. Rising acts like Toxic Lyrikali (“Backbencher”) and Tanzania’s Mavokali (“Obimo”) showed a knack for merging hip-hop with bongo flava, Afrobeats, and dancehall, giving what catches fire in Kenya a distinctive modern identity. And with all these wins, Kenya was hardly oblivious to the wider trends of the continent. If anything, the pan-Africanist music ideal found new expression through the embrace of a wildly addictive South African-pioneered 3-step subgenre, as exemplified by the popularity of songs like “Isaka (6am),” “Mali,” and “Bengicela.”