A park in Maryland

In June 2024 I was in Montgomery Village, Maryland, at a park I used to go to, recording promotional content with Drizilik. Somewhere in the conversation a question came up about the kind of music he makes. I can’t remember exactly how it was put. I just remember answering, “you know, it’s like Krio fusion.”

I didn’t think I was coining anything. The words came out because they felt right. Drizilik makes hip hop and contemporary Afrobeats, but he also makes reggae and R&B. His songs are not all the same kind of music. What ties them together is the language. In any Drizilik song you are bound to find a lot of Krio lyricism. To me, that is what Kriofusion is.

It’s the language, not the genre

The most common misunderstanding about Kriofusion is that it means mixing different sounds. It doesn’t. Kriofusion is about the language, not the type of music.

You can have Kriofusion that is reggae. You can have Kriofusion that is hip hop, R&B or baile funk. You could even have Kriofusion that is classical music. So long as the predominant language in the song is Krio, it is Kriofusion: Krio language, fused with whatever else the artist brings.

When I first wrote about the playlist in 2025, I described the genre partly through traditional rhythms like bubu and gumbay. Those sounds are still part of the story. But since then I have sharpened the definition, because the language is what makes the music unmistakably ours.

Who makes Kriofusion

You don’t have to call your music Kriofusion to be making it, though it helps. What matters is staying true to the language, especially now, with Nigerian pidgin spreading through Afrobeats. The artists who intentionally choose Krio and stick with it in their popular music are making Kriofusion. Even artists who say they aren’t, if their music is mainly in Krio, it’s Kriofusion.

ApreeL is Kriofusion. There is a lot of Temne in his music, but there is a lot of Krio too. Famous is Kriofusion. Kracktwist and Samza are Kriofusion. Go further back and you find Shadow Boxer, a rapper whose Krio lyricism I loved from the start. He was making the kind of music all of us were listening to from London to New York, but it was authentically Sierra Leonean because of Krio.

Not every song a Sierra Leonean artist makes is Kriofusion. But you will find that a lot of their discography is.

I also understand why some artists resist the label. They associate it with Drizilik. But Kriofusion is much bigger than Drizilik. It started before him and it shall continue after him. It is about us, as a country and a people, finding our own sound. Kriofusion is not the only sound of Sierra Leone, but it is a sound of Sierra Leone.

Why a name matters

Inside Sierra Leone, no artist struggles to explain what kind of music they make. People listen, and they get it. Outside Sierra Leone it is different. There is always the question: what is different about what you bring to the table? What is different about your sound?

As a publicist, I struggled with this when I led Drizilik’s account. How do you get people to care about music that isn’t from Nigeria or Ghana? How do you make them care about an artist who is a dominant force at home but doesn’t yet have a big global hit? How do you get people to care about music that is simply good music?

For Sierra Leone, I believe you need an identifier. That is what Kriofusion has done. For the artists who embrace it, it gives them a way to talk about their music, especially in the media and especially abroad. One all-inclusive name makes it easier to explain, and easier for the world to understand.

Why I’m putting it on the record

Most people who follow Sierra Leonean music know the word came from me. So this isn’t about claiming credit for the first time. It is about making sure that as Kriofusion gets referenced and reused, people understand where it came from and why.

It came from a time and a place where I was struggling to describe contemporary Sierra Leonean music. And it came from nation branding. Other countries have their sounds. Giving ours a name that is identifiable and unique to us is part of my larger mission: to tell Sierra Leone’s story and to brand Sierra Leone and Krio to the world. Kriofusion is not about any one artist or any one creative. It belongs to the country.

The name is already travelling. I see it on Instagram accounts, in content creators’ posts and in hashtags. That is exactly what a name should do. Once, someone online said they had come up with it. What they had actually coined was a different name, Afro Krio, which I had never heard of. Kriofusion has its own dated record, and I’d rather that record be clear now than argued over later.

For the record: the name came to me in June 2024. I first put it in print that September, in “Drizilik Live in London”, a piece I wrote for SwitSalone. I proposed it publicly in “The Truth About Afrobeats: It’s Not Nigerian” in April 2025, and defined it when I launched the Krio Fusion Playlist in May 2025.

Where Kriofusion goes next

The playlist has done more than anything to push the genre, so I’m keeping it going. It hasn’t been updated since December 2025, and a new update is coming within the next month, so that heading into December 2026 everyone knows the latest Kriofusion songs.

In five years, I want to see:

• A Kriofusion Music Awards. This was one of my hopes from the start.
• A Kriofusion compilation album. Think Now That’s What I Call Music: many artists on one record, marketed to the world as Sierra Leonean music.
• A Kriofusion festival, and Kriofusion merchandise.

Most of all, Kriofusion needs investment. Music and the creative sector are powerful for national identity, for diaspora engagement and for investment. Too often government doesn’t see music as lucrative. Yes, it is capital intensive, but music also generates revenue. We need to invest in local spaces where artists can perform, so that the young people in this sector can start making really good money from their craft.

I named the sound, but it is not mine. It belongs to Sierra Leone’s musicians, songwriters and producers. We have the brand. It is up to them to export it.