Fireboy DML

Fireboy has called Wande Coal one of the three foundations of his sound and, in his own words, his idol — a debt he made literal by getting him onto 'Spell,' the only feature on 'Apollo,' and later building an entire song, 'wande's bop,' around trying to recreate the exact feeling of Wande Coal's mid-2010s records. The influence lands as a vocal one: a soft, high, almost pleading falsetto laid over Afropop built from R&B chord changes rather than street-level percussion.

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2009

OlolufeWande Coal

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2020

SpellFireboy DML

listen forPlay Wande Coal's 'Ololufe' next to Fireboy's 'Spell' — both let a plaintive, reassuring falsetto float over a mid-tempo R&B-Afropop bed, the vocal doing the work of pure seduction rather than performance.

Fireboy has named Passenger as one of "three people" he considers "the foundation of my sound," telling Dazed "every influence on my music is by those three people" and crediting Passenger, alongside Jon Bellion and Wande Coal, with teaching him that "honesty is the soul of songwriting." It's an unusual credit for a Nigerian pop star, and it shows up less as a sonic quotation than as an approach: stripped-back, acoustic-guitar-led verses that read like a diary entry before the song opens into a bigger, more Afropop-scaled chorus.

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2012

Let Her GoPassenger

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2019

Need YouFireboy DML

listen forSet Passenger's 'Let Her Go' beside Fireboy's 'Need You' — both open on a lone acoustic guitar and a plainspoken, almost conversational confession before the arrangement swells, prioritizing the intimacy of the opening line over any hook-first pop instinct.

Jon Bellion is the third name in Fireboy's stated "foundation" trio, admired, in Fireboy's words, for the same "incredible love and dedication to just the art of music itself" he sees in Passenger and Wande Coal. The two later became genuine collaborators — both appeared alongside Jon Batiste on 2023's "Drink Water" — and the influence surfaces as a genre-blurring instinct: a rap-adjacent, syllable-packed verse cadence that opens up into a huge, gospel-scaled pop hook, built from Bellion's own hip-hop-schooled production sensibility rather than a straight Afrobeats template.

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2016

All Time LowJon Bellion

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2020

ChampionFireboy DML

listen forCompare Jon Bellion's 'All Time Low' with Fireboy's 'Champion' — both stack a clipped, half-rapped verse delivery against an oversized, triumphant chorus, the hip-hop cadence and the arena-pop payoff sitting in the same song without ever feeling like two different records.