This past May, Kah-Lo was boarding a flight in Australia, casually checking her socials as she waited to board. She clocked that one of her most recent posts – a clip from the music video for her March release “In This Bih,'” a collab with British producer Chris Lorenzo – had a few thousand views, and then the plane took off. When it landed a few hours later, she got on her phone again and saw that this same video had been viewed more than half a million times.
“I thought it was an Instagram bug,” she says.
It wasn’t. Instead, the Nigerian singer/songwriter/producer was going viral as “In This Bih’” took off. On May 21, Shazam announced that it was the most Shazam’d track of EDC Las Vegas 2026, and just over four months after its release, the club anthem now has 13.9 million global on-demand streams, according to Luminate. More than one person in the comment sections of Kah-Lo’s posts about the track call it nothing less than the song of the summer. Diplo called it “dance song of the year.”
This isn’t Kah-Lo’s first time clocking a hit. “Rinse & Repeat,” a collab with English producer Riton, became a major club hit in 2016, ultimately generating 73.6 million streams and earning Kah-Lo and Riton a 2017 Grammy nomination for best dance/electronic recording. That smash was followed by the success of 2022’s “Fake ID,” which was also made with Riton and has to date generated 568.1 million on-demand streams. (This number includes streams for both the original and a remix.)
These tracks made Kah-Lo — who was focused on being an R&B artist around the time she made “Rinse & Repeat” — an in-demand dance world vocalist. While the work had its highlights, including releases with Michaël Brun, Diplo and Blond:ish, James Jones and Sofi Tukker, she also found the experience destabilizing, as she was swarmed with topline requests from would-be collaborators who in many cases treated her like a commodity instead of a fellow artist and person.
It was a learning experience that led her to learn how to DJ and produce, with her debut EP, The Arrival, coming in 2021 and her first album, Pain/Pleasure, released in 2023. Her own label, Lagos Way Records, followed. Now, as an established dance world triple-threat with a new hit on her hands, she’s handling this fresh wave of success on her own terms.
“With ‘In This Bih,’” I was again making a song that felt huge and that I felt like it might dwarf my efforts, when I’ve come so far,” Kah-Lo says, talking to Billboard over Zoom. “The good thing, though, is that this time I have 10 years of experience behind me, and I know how it works.”
“In This Bih’” came directly from the club, having been inspired by a heavy night out that Kah-Lo had while she was in L.A. last September. (She’s based mostly in Lagos and London, but also spends a lot of time in Australia, L.A. and New York, where she graduated from Hofstra University in 2013.) She was out partying with, as she puts it, “a bunch of kids,” all of whom were drinking brown tequila. While she typically avoids this variety of liquor (“it never ends well for me”) on this night she partook.
“I was trying to keep up,” she says with a laugh. She had a session with Lorenzo the next day, and as she worked through her hangover, they made a track called “Oh No” — “because that [was the feeling] after this brown tequila got in my system,” she says. The second track made during the session was “In This Bih,’” a song in which she describes what she’d seen while out with the kids the night before. (“I’m throwing hand/In this bih’/they throwing a–/In this bih.'”)
After she and Lorenzo made the song, he drove her to Erewhon so she could get supplies to nurse herself back to health. “We were just bumping ‘In This Bih’” in the car,” she says, “and it was like, ‘Whoa.’”
They both felt like the song — a spare, wompy, catchy as hell tech house heater built on Kah-Lo’s swaggery vocals and intermittent dog barks — was special and, Kah-Lo says, “probably gonna go off.” She wasn’t sure if she wanted that to happen.
“I’ve been spending so long trying to stand on my own as a solo artist, and I was like, ‘If I release this song, it’s gonna put me back in square one.’ But then I was like, ‘You know what? If this is my place in history, so be it.’”
Her worry was understandable. Dance music has a long history of undervaluing and erasing female vocalist, especially Black female vocalists. Infamously, legendary vocal powerhouse Martha Wash received no vocal credit and was scrubbed from the imagery and music video for C&C Music Factory’s 1990 classic “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now),” despite the fact that the song is built around her iconic hook. (Wash later sued RCA Records when her name and likeness were also scrubbed from Black Box’s “Everybody Everybody” and “Strike It Up,” both built around her vocals.)
In April, singer/DJ/producer Kaleena Zanders told Billboard about “not getting the right royalties or splits and having to negotiate and fight for those things,” while contributing her vocals to collabs with male producers. “I think the [attitude] among some DJs can be like ‘Let’s just find some vocals,’ very casual. I’m just like, ‘Okay, but I’m a whole human,’” Zanders said. In dance music, it can be difficult to even identify who’s actually singing on the song, with vocalists not always receiving credit. (Kah-Lo herself wrote about this issue in Billboard in 2023, upon the release of Pain/Pleasure.)
As artists clamored to work with her after her first big hit with Riton, Kah-Lo experienced all these lame cliches for herself. “When you’re on the singer/songwriter end of things, it’s really about trying to fight your way to the front,” she says. “I did that naturally out the gate, and I didn’t know that was a taboo thing to do. I didn’t know there was all of this history behind it, of this always happening with Black artists, and especially Black women.” She often had to fight for credits, and the royalties, stream counts and visibility they bring.
Her turning point came during the pandemic when DJ/producer Michaël Brun – her neighbor in New York at the time – taught her how to DJ. She’d been having a hard time with it, then Brun suggested she just try playing her own songs. “It was like a light shone on me,” recalls Kah-Lo. “He told me that because my voice has a cadence and tone where it doesn’t really have a key, it can mixed over anything. I was like, ‘Oh my god, this all makes sense now.’”
A steady run of gigs was booked after the pandemic ended, and her EP and album followed, with both projects demonstrating the swagger, style and and power she brings to her music. As she’s established herself, she’s learned to be choosy. “I’m really selective about who I collaborate with,” she says. “People who just see me as a top line, I don’t even respond to the email.”
She’s also learned to insist that key video clips are posted to her own social channels, giving greater visibility to all her work. (“It helps that Chris is a great collaborator,” she adds of Lorenzo. “He’s like, ‘Go for it.'”) With all of this wisdom, she says this time around she’s more prepared “both mentally and team wise” to navigate this new hit.
She’s also learned, as so many people and especially women in the industry do as they get more established, to trust her instinct. “I wish I’d listened to my gut a lot more in the beginning,” she says. “There were a lot of times where I was like, ‘This doesn’t really feel right,’ and then I found out years later that my gut was, like, yelling, and I wasn’t listening. Now, I have a very strict no a–hole policy.”
She also knows how to spot the signs of a potential a–hole. “I take it from even how I’m addressed in the email,” she says. “If someone emails me and says, ‘Hey, we’re looking for a vocalist,’ that out the gate is a big crimson flag. To me, that says ‘it could have been anyone’ and it tells me they don’t see me as an equal partner in a collaboration.”
(She acknowledges, however, that it’s not always easy to say no to opportunities when you’re first starting out. “It’s very tough to make a choice of wanting to be heard and wanting that respect, but also being able to say no,” she says, “but I will say for sure that gut instinct is 100%”)
The wisdom is currently proving useful, as “In This Bih’” pops off and the collab requests roll in. (“The DMs are flooded,” she says.) The song’s success has also affected her release schedule, with her collaborators on various tracks all moving up the release dates to try and capitalize. “All of a sudden, with songs I recorded two years ago, people are like, ‘We want to put this out right now.'” (Since the release of “In This Bih'” she’s released songs with Francis Mercier and Peking Duck, along with her solo track “Suddenly, That’s Strange.”)
Her next release is coming in September, with an appearance with Lorenzo at HARD Summer in Los Angeles happening during the festival next weekend (Aug. 1-2.) She may also possibly tour in October, saying that “The calendar is full, baby.”
And in a clear sign of power, artists Kah-Lo works with now always ask to have her name on their collaborations, because, as she says, “they know it’s a cool stamp of approval if I agree to be on a song. Because if I do say so myself: I don’t make flops.”