In partnership with BandLab
Victoria Ibek knows the modern artist has to wear many hats. She speaks to NME first thing on a Friday as she gears up for a busy day of making TikToks to promote her music and songwriting for another artist. She’s also pitching her rousing, rhythmic new single ‘Halftime’ for TV and movie syncs on ReverbNation, a platform that allows musicians to connect with industry partners. “You know, the grind never stops,” she says with a wry smile, speaking over Zoom from her LA home.
Ibek was born and mainly raised in Charlotte, North Carolina, but from the age of 10 to 16, she lived in Nigeria, where her parents hail from. “I grew up listening to religious Nigerian music – specifically Igbo cultural music,” she recalls. “I fell in love with the rhythms and earthy R&B tones of traditional tribal music, but I also got into super-American pop like Katy Perry and Christina Aguilera.” Now, when people tell her that she’s “in a lot of different places” musically, she replies: “Yes, I want to be a little bit of everything!”
In 2024, with help from a BandLab Creator Grant, Ibek relocated to California to study at LAAMP (Los Angeles Academy For Artists & Music Production). Previously, she made all her own beats – “crudely, I might add!” – but the course has allowed her to collaborate on a rotating basis with other budding songwriters and producers. “You have to make yourself very vulnerable from the start, but I love bouncing ideas off other people,” she says.
Now, she’s been selected for BandLab And NME present: Get Featured, a new music initiative through Opportunities via ReverbNation that gives emerging artists a chance to be heard by NME’s global audience of music fans. Here, she talks about building a long-term career and the coming-of-age narrative that drives her upcoming EP.
Hi Victoria! So, what’s the story behind your latest single, ‘Halftime’?
“I wrote it after we were given a prompt [in class] to write a song that could work on an advertisement or movie soundtrack. Growing up, I’m not gonna lie, I didn’t know a lot about sports, but from 19 to 23, I found myself in the sports space more often. I’m from Charlotte, so I’d always be in the Hornets [basketball] stadium thinking: ‘Dude, they play the same song every game.’ So I challenged myself to create a new anthem that could be played at a sports stadium and feel really impactful in that moment. And it became ‘Halftime’.”
Is ‘Halftime’ part of a larger project?
“It’s part of an eight-song EP that’s basically finished. Two songs are out – ‘Halftime’ and ‘Wish U Were’ – and my goal is to release another three or four before I drop the EP. I’d describe it as an Afropop project that follows my coming-of-age journey. I grew up American-Nigerian, but I’m also very pop – very Katy Perry. So I wanted to tell the story of someone who starts out shy and not so comfortable with both sides of herself, but becomes more confident as she experiments [musically]. I guess I’m saying: ‘I don’t care if it doesn’t make sense to you. It makes sense to me because I am both of these worlds. I don’t have to stay on one side of the page.'”
What aspect of being an artist do you find the most challenging?
“Honestly, it’s the feedback. I’m an empath: I write what I know, what I feel. Because of how real things are for me – like, I can think of a song and remember the exact moment I wrote it and how it made me feel – it’s hard when someone else listens and says: ‘Oh, this makes me feel a totally different thing.’ But an artist needs to be amenable to feedback and willing to make changes, so I’m getting better at it.”
Besides releasing the EP, what are your main aims for the year?
“I just want to get myself in a position where I feel like I can make music forever. I think the real reason why people give up on their dreams isn’t because they lose their love for it, but because it becomes hard to balance with, you know, daily life. I’m about to turn 25, so I think it’s really important for me to find a way to do this [long-term], whether that’s writing for other people, or working in A&R. So outside of the standard [answer of] ‘I want to win a Grammy’, more realistically, I just want to make sure I can continue making music.”
Not to put you on the spot, but if you could A&R a project for any artist, who would you choose?
“I’d love to A&R Sabrina Carpenter. And this is probably a little more obvious, but I’d love to A&R Tyla because I feel like I understand where she’s trying to go [musically]. But actually, I think Normani would be my number one choice because she has so much potential to go in different directions. I believe in taking advantage of all opportunities. Like, be able to sing, dance in the music video, sell stuff on TikTok, get yourself on the red carpet. I don’t want to look back and think: ‘Man, I should have tried that.'”
You also find time to do music therapy work. How does that inform the way you write songs?
“Growing up, my mother had a daycare, so I’ve always been around children. My music tends to be super-whimsical and pop-commercial because I like that feeling you get when you remember times when you were a kid. You know, when everything felt so free and you weren’t worrying about how anybody else was viewing you. My whole goal as an artist is to create songs that are like time stamps for people. Like, ‘this song reminds me of a great night with my friends’ or ‘this song reminds me of music therapy’. There’s nothing performative about kids, so my goal is to create music that makes them feel something in a real and immediate way.”
Photography: Andrea Gylthe