After three years of waiting, Black Sherif released his sophomore album, Iron Boy, on April 3, 2025, to critical and popular acclaim.The album features 15 songs with a 43-minute and 19-second runtime. Although the album cover leaves a little more to be desired, the album itself delivers on multiple scores, blending hip hop, afrobeat and high life influences. Blacko collaborated with significantly more producers on Iron Boy, counting a total of 11 producers and a Grammy-nominated mixer. Unlike TVINW, musical features are left to a minimum, with only Nigeria’s Seyi Vibez and Fireboy DML on the album in what is an apparent creative decision rather than a mere marketing ploy. The production takes chances and is rewarded with achieving the bliss of eargasms as seen in the choral harmonies on “Changes” and how Blacko and Seyi Vibez’s vocals overlap and caramelise on “Sin City”. Thankfully, a book — well, an album — is not judged by its cover, so let’s jump headlong into the collection of songs on Iron Boy.Blacko returns to his favourite subject on his second album: struggle and survival. The album opens with “Victory Song”, which thematically sets the tone for the trajectory of the album. The songs simultaneously straddle highs and lows, tribulation and victory. The struggle Blacko sings of is multifaceted: the pressures of success, industry pull-me-downs, temptation, family drama, making the dough.Blacko conveys this struggle in a rather visceral way with his choice of cavalric imagery, an extended metaphor for the battlefield called life. There’s a ‘council meeting’ for the release of the album in a faraway castle with a dragon flying overhead. The visuals for the singles “So It Goes” and “Rebel Music” employ cinematic shots of warfare, with the “Rebel Music” video featuring dragons and war banners, reminiscent of HBO’s House of Dragons. War iconography is not new to Blacko’s artistry. The music video for “Second Coming” features an extra brandishing a machete. Eyes are red on the streets, and the motto is “trapaganda forever”. The bag is for the taking, so “se me sika delay, I carry machete”, he declares in “Top of the Morning”. For a young man in the music business, the industry can be serpentine to navigate, and one cannot afford to slack on the hustle.“Eye Open” lays this bare:
“Nti meda aa me ntumi daadaa/ I keep one eye open/ Left eye closed and the right eye working”.It is very fitting that the album closes out with “January 9th”. How many times haven’t we said ‘I’m fine’ to the question of ‘how are you?’ even when our lives were in limbo. To say ‘I’m fine’ despite reality is to be hopeful, it is to say
“Everything is under control, oh/ If I tell you I’m alright/ You should know that I’m alright”.Mental health is also a recurring theme in Blacko’s music. Between TVINW and Iron Boy lies an easily forgotten 2-song EP project titled “Take Care of Yourself Blacko”, released in 2023. The two songs, “YAYA” and “SIMMER DOWN”, explore mental health with vulnerability and take us into his mental landscape.We see the full extent of his struggles in “YAYA”:
“If I face my devil sober mentumi, so I burn one with my colleagues… Wonya time aa yɛ a kɔ beach/ Hye kakra enjoy the breeze”.The title of the EP is a resounding call to prioritise self-care, to make time for rest and recuperation. Blacko is one of the few Ghanaian artists to talk openly and vulnerably about substance use to get through rough times. This got some fans wondering what a young and successful man like Blacko could be so troubled about. These fans seem to have forgotten that the stakes are high.“Top of the Morning”, an instant street anthem for the mandems, gives us a scope of how high the stakes are:
“Decisions made in my pyjamas/ talk of the morning matter… And my mind/ E full up, I’m going mental”.Even as the album sometimes wallows in the low points, it revels in resilience, and, at times, is inspirational, as is the case with “Changes”. Rest feels like an unattainable luxury, especially from a working-class background, so we run around straddling burnout until we crash out. The title track, “Iron Boy”, reminds us to “take time and try to be happy”. The honesty and vulnerability of Blacko’s artistry bring to the fore the issue of mental health in Ghana, especially among young men, and raise the larger question of the lack of spaces and avenues for men to navigate mental health issues.The Iron Boy is currently globetrotting from North America and Europe, propagating his message and art to the world. There has been no dates for Ghana shows yet, but when the dates finally arrive, best belief the youngins, the oldies and everyone in-between will be there with Blacko, shouting back to him at the top of their lungs the very lyrics that were once the petals of his artistry but has come to mean so much to his adoring fans.The second coming is here. Are you ready?Follow the writer:IG - @the.rainbow.moth