Shatter the Standards and Rosa Delgado offer a detailed review of Ibeyi’s new album, Offering (June 2026): “By handing it to a crew of producers with songs of Yoruba invocation and heartbreak, the sisters’ blended voices are the through-line that survives the new electronics.” Here are excerpts (including a link to the video of “Aset”).
Four years came and went between Spell 31 and this release, and most of that time was spent jettisoning themselves from a major label and aiming their sights back at Cuba. It’s where the twin sisters, Naomi Díaz and Lisa-Kaindé Díaz—collectively Ibeyi—shot the album’s new material, in the city where their father found employment as a percussionist. It was reframed as a homecoming of sorts, a trip to find themselves again, but perhaps the most striking departure is the one you’ll encounter long before the opening vocals. On the new project, Ibeyi handed the control of the narrative and the beats to a team of producers they’ve never worked with. The two instrumental focal points that anchored everything they had ever created prior—Díaz’s drum kit and her sister’s piano—are gone. Their absence removes the last thing standing between the listener and two perfectly blended voices.
The project opens with “Olokun,” a stark, devotional plea set at the base of an oceanic abyss, in which a group of voices chants the refrain, “Sawa te late o lokú,” calling out to the water’s iricha; an all-consuming bottom that’s felt somewhere beneath the chest, the middle section dense, the escape into nothing left abruptly bare. As the tempo rises, on “Moshpit,” the electronics are gnashing: heavy distortion drags on either sister’s layered harmonies as they assert, “I’m a god, then I’m nothing/I’m a void, incompleted,” atop a thick rhythm that stutters rather than bobs. Haitian producer Michaël Brun’s expertise on “Aset” anchors down the heavy rhythm and steady bodies within the mix when things get especially synth-driven, while many of their collaborators streamline each song toward a sound familiar from many modern pop and electronic R&B artists, only the sisters’ voices pulling it back.
Two cosmologies coexist across these invocations, distinct lines drawn by how the lyrics position them; the Lucumí energy, “Olokun,” is honored as “the spirit of the ocean” on the title track, whilst Elegguá, the road opener, is addressed in lament on “Baba” with a chorus of “AH Elegguá Baba Elegguá.” As “Baba”’s refrain repeats and morphs into the declaration of “I won’t listen anymore/Trust them anymore,” the music finds clarity of voice with “I’m who I was looking for,” a kind of answered prayer. On “Aset,” Ibeyi look to Egypt, and the sisters narrate an Egyptian myth that begins with “I am Osiris Rising/I kept stealing their knowledge/Now I know divination/As I throw all the shells in,” weaving a tale of rebirth and resurrection by means of shell divination, leading to a powerful resolution in Spanish: “Esto es amor eterno.” Here, the devotion to a deity and a lover converge—the rite allows for more tenderness between breakup narratives than either is accustomed to delivering. [. . .]
Read the full review at https://www.shatterthestandards.com/p/album-review-offering-by-ibeyi
Read another review at https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/jun/19/ibeyi-offering-review (The Guardian’s Rachel Aroesti writes, “Naomi and Lisa-Kaindé Diaz mix ancient lore with heavy bass, and harmonies with distortion, to incantatory effect.”)
Also see https://open.spotify.com/album/2KrpEIIVUU7AMtTsCOzkAj
Shatter the Standards and Rosa Delgado offer a detailed review of Ibeyi’s new album, Offering (June 2026): “By handing it to a crew of producers with songs of Yoruba invocation and heartbreak, the sisters’ blended voices are the through-line that survives the new electronics.” Here are excerpts (including a link to the video of “Aset”).
