Savara Is Building the Soundtrack to a New Kenya

But by the seventh week, the crowd had vanished. Only his partner remained. “That’s when I knew that fame is a crowd, but impact is intimate,” he tells OkayAfrica. That moment shifted something in him. What began as a physical setback forced him to confront what success really meant and refocused his artistry towards making an impact.

Today, Savara is guided by that clarity. It’s been a year and a half since Sauti Sol announced an indefinite break after 17 years. Like his bandmates — Bien-Aimé Baraza, Polycarp Otieno, and Willis Chimano — Savara began releasing solo music. But it’s only now that he seems to be finding his groove.

This is because, as he puts it, he’s in his “Kanye moment” — a self-described, unapologetic leap into sampling and creativity without rules. For an artist as experimental as Savara, used to making music as part of a group, this freedom is a breath of fresh air.

“I'm very experimental ... I want to give Africa different sounds,” he says. “People are ready for different kinds of rhythms.”

In the last six months, he’s pushed that freedom to new levels. He released “Show You Off,” a konpa-tinged jam with a colorful video that has racked up over six million views. His most recent track, “Sianda,” reimagines a traditional Luo song into a vibrant ode to plus-size women. Within a month, it’s already crossed one million views on YouTube. It was met with immediate chatter for sampling a tribe and language that was not his own, as well as the gorgeous plus-sized video vixen featured in the visual.

“Right now I'm not following any rules,” he says. “I'm just doing what I feel.”

And even if there’s controversy, he doesn’t seem to care. Because for Savara, he isn’t just making music, he’s making a statement. He wants to see traditional Kenyan instruments in global playlists, to hear his Kenyan stories, sounds, and rhythms echoed across the continent and beyond.

He talks often about cultural integration, about blending the old with the new in ways that resonate with modern audiences. An example of this is in the use of traditional nyatiti in “Sianda.” In the music video, he’s seen playing the instrument like a rock guitar.

“I'm borrowing folk music and turning them into wild popular music." What’s emerging is a body of work more raw and rooted than anything he’s done before.

Savara describes himself as a vision bearer, someone determined to redesign Kenyan music through rhythm and melody. His sound draws from indigenous instruments, coastal folk traditions, and ancestral chants. He’s not chasing global trends or trying to fit into the tightening mold of Afrobeats. Instead, he’s expanding East Africa’s sonic identity.

“I am an East African warrior. I'm seeing the world of music gravitate towards Africa. This is the time [and] if you don't stand up, you won’t be counted? So my confidence comes because I have to stand up to be counted. Because if I don’t believe in this music, who will believe it?”

Despite the success he’s enjoying now, that first year after Sauti Sol’s pause was intense. Leaving the shared creative process, and the security of a group identity meant stepping into an uncertain space.

“It was overwhelming at first,” he admits. “There was anxiety. You wonder, what next? What’s your sound now?” There were days of overthinking and questioning whether his music would resonate without the familiar chemistry of his bandmates.

As a solo artist, he had to embrace instinct and trust his gut. That’s exactly what he did with his mixtape, No Overthinking. He dropped it impulsively, hoping to support it with a U.S. tour that never materialized due to visa complications.

When the tour fell through, Savara was forced to sit with the silence that followed. “I had to just go back to the drawing board,” he says, describing the anticlimax after months of planning.

Without the live shows to anchor his release, many of the songs on No Overthinking were not given their full potential to chart. But the disappointment became a crash course in self-promotion.

“That’s when I realized you can’t just make the music and expect it to move. You have to push it, believe in it, market it,” he says.

That realization marked a turning point. He threw himself into the grind of independence and built his brand momentum from scratch. Right now, he proclaims that he’s in an incredibly creative state, a time that he wants to pour into new music, and eventually a new album in 2025.

And with the new sound and energy that has been accompanying the recent music, the people are expecting big things.

“I’m not trying to be the next big name. I’m trying to be the name that means something.”