Ibeyi Left XL and Released 'Offering' on Their Own Label Today

Ibeyi put out their fourth album today, and the biggest fact about it is on the spine, not the tracklist. Offering arrives on IBEYI Records, the twins' own label. After three records on XL Recordings, the British indie that signed them as teenagers in 2013, Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Díaz now own the thing they made.

That matters because the last one almost got away from them. Spell 31 in 2022 brought in outside hands: pop songwriter Eg White, rappers Pa Salieu and Berwyn. It was their most collaborative album and their least centered. Offering is the correction. The sisters wrote most of it themselves, and you can hear the decision in the framing before you hear a single beat.

Who Ibeyi are, for anyone who came in late

The name is Yoruba for twins, the sacred Ibeji. Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi were born in Paris in 1994, spent their first couple of years in Havana, and grew up between the two. Their father was Miguel "Angá" Díaz, the Cuban percussionist who won a Grammy with Irakere and held down congas in the Buena Vista Social Club alongside Ibrahim Ferrer and Rubén González. He died in 2006. Naomi, then eleven, picked up his cajón. Lisa-Kaindé sings lead and plays piano. Both learned Yoruba folk songs. That lineage is not decoration on an Ibeyi record. It is the foundation: batá and cajón under the harmonies, Santería invocations sung in Yoruba next to verses in French, Spanish, and English.

The singles tell you the plan

The reintroduction was "Aset," released last month. The sisters explained the choice in a statement on Facebook: "We wanted to come back to you with Aset's voice and confidence... but first we had to go home." Aset is the Egyptian name for Isis. The track leads with Naomi's percussion and Lisa-Kaindé's stacked vocals, and it sets the tone for a record that keeps reaching back to mythology to talk about the present.

"Baba" is the one critics have been pointing at since the advance reviews. The Guardian described it as incantatory vocals over an irresistibly grimy bassline, and quoted its refrain: "One thing is for sure, I'm who I was looking for." That line is the whole album in miniature. Self-sufficiency is the lyrical theme and the business model at once.

Then there is "Moshpit," which is where Offering gets loud. It is the album's hardest swing into distortion, the moment the harmonies get shoved up against something abrasive instead of resting on a clean low end. Ibeyi have flirted with heaviness before. Here they commit to it.

The tracklist runs twelve songs: "Olokun," "Aset," "Focus," "Moshpit," "Baba," "The Process," "Offerings," "La tendresse d'un mot," "I Know You Loved Me," "Good Life," "Hurry Hurry," and "Lucky." The French-titled track brings in pianist Sofiane Pamart, which on paper is the prettiest detour on the record, a classical-leaning name dropped into a project otherwise built on drums and bass.

Where it lands

The risk with returning to first principles is that it reads as retreat. The early read on Offering is the opposite. Reviewers have called it the duo's stranger and grander work, and the framing checks out: shorter songs, heavier bottom end, less interest in pop legibility than Spell 31 had. Most of these tracks sit under three minutes. That is a duo trusting an idea to land fast rather than stretching it for the radio.

What I want to hear confirmed over a few more listens is whether the back half holds the tension the singles set up, or whether the shortest tracks turn into sketches. "Olokun" opens the record at a minute and a half, an invocation more than a song. That can be a doorway or it can be filler. On an album this committed to ritual, the difference is everything.

Either way, the move is the story. A duo that spent a decade on a tastemaker label walked, kept the masters, and made the most self-reliant record of their career about exactly that. The tour follows this winter, 22 dates across Europe and the UK starting November 7 in Amiens, then 12 US dates from late January, opening in San Francisco at the Fillmore.