Dive In marks Joshua Baraka’s next leap with JAE5

‘Dive In’ with JAE5 doesn’t ease in. It drops with the weight of someone who has already decided what he’s willing to risk. The production is steady, warm, built on JAE5’s instinct for melody and space. Baraka threads through it with a vocal that doesn’t waver, even when he admits he met the girl of his dreams while dragging himself through the lowest stretch of his life.

At 24, Joshua Baraka is past the stage of being introduced. Uganda’s highest-streamed artist, a name spread across TikTok and Spotify charts, but the numbers don’t explain the quiet that hits a venue when he steps up to sing. At EartH Hackney, halfway through his debut European headline tour, the crowd’s noise cut down to nothing before his voice even rose.

‘Dive In’ is only the second single from Juvie, the album due 28 November, yet it sketches the frame clearly. The record is executive-produced by JAE5, and their chemistry shows. Baraka’s vibrato presses against layered percussion and a low-lit bass-line, with traces of vocoder sliding under the surface. It’s not Afrobeats as trend piece or R&B as nostalgia it’s the sound of someone shaping both to his own dimensions.

Baraka describes Juvie as a portrait of being young and pushing through the contradictions that come with it. Love and hesitation. Dreams and bills. The sequencing and collaborators suggest a wide scope Bien, The Compozers, Pa Salieu, Olamide, Young Jonn but the centre remains his voice and the specific way he places detail. A walk across Kampala to music school with his mother. Nights playing piano in bars at seventeen. Early EPs like Baby Steps and Growing Pains that carried the weight of their titles. His catalogue reads like a diary that happens to have caught fire.

That fire spread quickly. Wrong Places, also with JAE5, went global this year. Streams into the millions, billions of views, stages shared with Tems, festival crowds of twenty thousand in Nairobi. Nominations from AFRIMA. But in the middle of the noise, the core hasn’t shifted. The songs still carry a trace of where they started: cramped rooms, half-broken pianos, repetition until the walls shook.

At Hackney, that memory flickered again. The band pulled back, the lights thinned, and he stepped forward. No theatrics, no dramatic pause. Just a line sung into the air, and a room of strangers recognising it as something they’d already felt.

Juvie is not pitched as crossover, and that’s why I think it connects the way it has. Baraka isn’t smoothing his edges to fit someone else’s market. He’s building out from his own ground, with JAE5 shaping the angles. The guests act as tension points, not distractions voices that expand the frame without shifting its centre.

For East Africa, and for the circles already tuned in across the diaspora, Baraka is more than a breakthrough. He is evidence that the story can be told without compromise. Practice, stage, studio the gap between them keeps closing.

When Juvie arrives on 28 November, it will do so without ceremony. The point is not announcement but accumulation. ‘Dive In’ is the start. The rest is waiting its turn.