Victony has two wrong impressions to correct: First, the tattoo of the small figure on his left arm is not a girl; second, the figure — despite having blue skin, short pink braids, pointed elfin ears, and short antennae on its forehead — is not an alien. “This is Tredax,” he tells Teen Vogue. “He's just a citizen of Outlawville.”
Outlawville is the alternate universe the 22-year-old Afrobeats artist created to represent a place for unbridled self-expression. Tredax is Victony’s avatar, a character he developed alongside a visual artist and designer named Bolt. Tredax exists in a world filled with purple grass and floating mountains — a world where anything and any way of being is possible. At Victony's core, this is the kind of place he aspires to live in — and to create further.
On a warm Friday evening in June, he sits across from me in the dining area of his sparse but tastefully decorated apartment in Lagos, Nigeria, with its high walls and stunning view of the Lekki-Epe Expressway. Still in his house clothes, this fast-rising talent looks relaxed and at peace with the world. Says Victony, “I'm in a very good space.”
It has taken some time for him to arrive at this good space. Victony blew up on the Afrobeats scene when Afropop star Mayorkun featured him on his 2021 hit track, “Holy Father.” Before then, though, Victony experienced a tragedy that almost ended his life, just as his career was taking off.
Around 3 a.m. on April 26, 2021, Victony was on his way home from a club with friends when they got into a fatal accident. The accident, which Victony tells me he slept through and thus remembers nothing about, claimed the life of his friend Doyin and left Victony unable to walk for many months.
Several surgeries were required to fix his serious physical injury, but the guilt over not being able to remember what happened lingers. “I wish I could remember,” Victony says. “I just feel like maybe things would have been different if I was awake.”
When Victony talks about this time in his life, his face takes on a worn aspect. In the corners of his eyes there are specks of the disorienting experience he'd like to forget as much as he’d like to remember it.
Despite this emotional limbo, though, Victony is rising past the tragedy that has loomed over his career. He seems, throughout our conversation, to have made peace with what happened, while remaining optimistic about all the good things that could still happen to him.
This radical optimism fuels Victony's faith in a world where people who exist on the fringe can have a place to gather. And it is this same optimism that has given him — a few months after his full recovery — the will to write another story for himself.
Growing up in Lagos, Victony, born Anthony Ebuka Victor, always had a way of standing out. “I don't go through the traditional system of doing things with my lifestyle, how I dress, how I sound,” he says. He began singing at age 10. He enjoyed watching music videos after school. In school, he acted in plays, represented his school in academic competitions, and loved dancing so much that he formed a dance group with two of his school friends.
There may have been signs then of where his future was headed, but Victony found himself easily bored. Those activities posed no challenge to him. “That's why I still do music,” he says. “I never got tired of [it].”
Before being featured on “Holy Father,” Victony tried his hand at rap, covering songs like Burna Boy’s “On the Low” and Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow,” which he uploaded on SoundCloud. The early pandemic quarantine allowed time for self-discovery, and he felt the desire to move into Afropop and Afrobeats — only to encounter a steep learning curve. “The aura, the feeling during lockdown was very different, and that prompted me to want to try something new,” he recalls. After recording some rap songs, he hopped on an Afrobeats tune and found that he sounded, simply, bad. Luckily, he's a naturally competitive person and stuck with the genre change. Since then, his impression of Afrobeats and what the genre requires of its artists has changed.
He got his artist name by combining his last name, Victor, with his first, Anthony. Victony’s sound is defined by his unforgettable falsetto, but it's also in the well-considered writing, where you can connect with experiences, existential musings, desire, and a groovy playfulness.
“I just felt like it was an easy way out because I used to feel like, Oh, for you to be an artist, you really have to think about everything you're doing, how you write, and blah, blah, blah," Victony explains. "But when I got into the Afrobeat space, I realized that it was even harder because a key element of Afrobeat is relatability. [But you have to do that] and still make sense. You still have to be metaphoric, you still have to be creative with the writing.”
Although he has made steady strides in his career, Victony says he’s still figuring it out: “I'm still learning.”
After he was released from the hospital following the accident, Victony spent the better part of the year in a wheelchair, and the rest of his healing process on crutches. He firmly says he never thought about leaving his music career behind; rather, he turned to it when it came time to heal: “Music is how I live. Music helped me get out of that phase faster. Just listening to my unreleased work, seeing how much work I still need to put in, how much I couldn’t wait for the world to hear what I had at the time. Honestly, that kept me going.”
The traffic from the expressway punctures our conversation while the sounds from his street — people talking, a generator running — float up and settle in different corners of the living room. There’s something mundane about it, almost inappropriate given the sensitive subject we’re discussing. But the background noise is also a reminder of the people and communities that surround him, that build him up.
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Victony couldn’t have predicted that love from fans would play a big part in getting him through those early trials, even when his career was in an embryonic stage. “‘Holy Father’ came out when I was still in my wheelchair," he recalls. "Just seeing so much love from everybody out there, that [motivated] me to finish up my project and follow up the success.”
The resulting EP, Outlaw, became his most important. It is an expansive diary entry, a therapy session, and an escape room all at once. Says Victony, “The first song on the EP is called ‘Outlaw.’ Every time I listen to that song, it just gives me a flashback of everything that's happened in my life and paints vivid pictures of what the future is going to be.” He adds, “That song embodies every emotion that I felt at the time.”
On songs like “Kolomental,” Victony sings about refusing to become overwhelmed in the aftermath of the ordeal he’s been through. The opening line expresses that should he think too deeply about his situation, and be unable to enjoy the early days of a blossoming career, he might find death. “All my life I knew how to walk, and one day I can't do these simple things,” he says. “You wake up in the morning, you can't even brush your teeth or do things yourself, and that was just stressful.”
In other songs, like “Soweto,” the superstar seeks and finds escape, singing about living it up and going crazy over a love interest. The song, with a music video that has over 52 million views on YouTube, has also received critical acclaim and inspired multiple remixes, including one with Don Toliver and Rema.
Outlaw, born of great tragedy, provided the perfect landscape for Victony to flex his quick-witted lyricism and talent for holding vulnerability in his hands as it transforms into something compelling and universal. These days, though, Victony is settling into the realization that this storm is over. “I don't think [I’ll be] scared of anything again,” he says.
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He has started making songs that feel light, even indulgent. He’s excited to release new music for the first time in more than a year — two songs, “My Darling” and “Angelus,” which came out in late June.
“Not putting out music is boring,” Victony says in his nasal, perpetually upbeat voice. When he starts to talk about his forthcoming projects, his eyes glisten with obvious excitement and a sort of relief to be entering the next phase of his career.
“My Darling” and “Angelus” are classic Victony. In both songs, the instrumentals are spare, lined with bass guitars, soft drum pads, steady percussion, and, of course, there's his unforgettable falsetto. In upcoming work, Victony intends to commit himself to joy. It is, after all, an important element in this phase of his becoming. “When you don’t feel happy for such a long time," he says, "it becomes important to you.”
In Outlawville, Victony allows himself to explore the nuances of his softest feelings. For most male Afrobeats artists, that kind of vulnerability is hardly a priority. But the fictional aliases and avatars Victony has created offer him that freedom.
In a Victony post from the early days after the accident, Tredax sits solemnly in the waiting area of a hospital. When Victony had his third and final surgery — an experience he describes as “smooth and not so smooth” — he shared a picture of Tredax with his hair cut short and dyed black, sitting near crutches at the foot of a bed. A medical drip is set up above Tredax’s head, and a recording mic and speaker are positioned around him. The image captures something forlorn, wistful. In real life, Victony's doctor had just advised him to take a two-month break. He wrote at the time, “I must go thru this hell to find my heaven.”
Outlawville enabled Victony to access the language of vulnerability he needed to get through the most challenging phase of his life so far. Now, he’s thinking about freedom and the new life he wants to build. “Freedom to me is, like, when you're not scared to be yourself,” he begins. The sun is setting and the sky through his high windows is a heartbreaking shade of orange. “If you have a voice within you telling you to do something," he adds, "or telling you to say something and you're not scared to let that voice out, then you're free.”
Photo Credits
Creative Director: Ade Samuel
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Digitech: Demola Heshin
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Stylist: Jahn Affah
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Hair Stylist: Kehinde Are
Makeup Artist: Ezeikel Onome
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Video Credits
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Editorial Credits:
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