Earlier in the year, Nigerian Trailblazing twin musical acts, The Lijadu Sisters (Yeye Taiwo Lijadu and the late Kehinde Lijadu) and Numero Group announced their extensive multi-year partnership to reissue and restore the duo’s discography.
Now available to fans is a remastered edition of their final album, 1979’s Horizon Unlimited (which featured sunny hits like “Come On Home”) in LP and CD. The package includes the first-ever transcription of the record’s lyrics in Yoruba and English, corrected album credits, and more. Numero Group has also released all five of the Lijadu Sisters’ LPs (Urede, Danger, Mother Africa, and Sunshine) on streaming platforms, and will announce the physical editions over the next few years.
In their prime, The Lijadu Sisters’ music offered critical analysis of the socio-political climate of the then, newly independent Nigeria. As one of the only female-led acts of the era, they heralded conversations around gender and equality which inspired the work of fans like Amaarae, Ayra Starr, Hayley Williams, Jamie xx and Nas.
“Horizon Unlimited was our last album with Decca that came out in 1979,” Yeye Taiwo Lijadu said in a press statement. “It’s been a long time since then and this really is part of a much longer story, but amongst one of the most significant things I remember was that we, the Lijadu Sisters, paid for all the studio and band session fees. At the time, this was unusual, and not the arrangement we had with that record label. We were originally meant to record at Decca West Africa in Lagos, but when we got to the studio, no one had told us that it was being upgraded—from eight tracks to twenty-four. So, we brought everyone to London and made the album there instead.”
The partnership with Numero Group aims to correct the issues of unpaid royalties, copyright infringement, as well as gender and racial-based discrimination the artists faced during their formative years
