For more than a decade, an Ibeyi song meant two things you could count on: Naomi Diaz behind a cajón or a set of Batá drums, and her twin sister Lisa-Kaindé at the piano. Offering, the duo’s fourth album, has neither. The sisters spent this record handing both instruments to a rotating cast of producers they had never worked with before, leaving only the one thing that was never up for negotiation: their voices, sung together so closely that on several tracks it’s genuinely hard to tell where one stops and the other starts.
Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Diaz were born in Paris in December 1994, to a Cuban father and a French-Venezuelan mother, and spent their first two years in Havana before the family settled back in France. Their father, Miguel “Anga” DÃaz, was a Grammy-winning percussionist who played with the Latin jazz group Irakere and later joined the Buena Vista Social Club, performing alongside Ibrahim Ferrer and Compay Segundo. He died in 2006, when the twins were 11. Naomi picked up his cajón soon after, and the sisters began studying the Yoruba songs and SanterÃa traditions that ran through their father’s side of the family, the same traditions that gave the duo its name. Ibeyi means twins in Yoruba.
Their mother, Maya Dagnino, pushed Lisa-Kaindé toward songwriting, and by their late teens the sisters were performing around Paris. In 2013, XL Recordings founder Richard Russell found a video of them singing “Mama Says” online and brought them to London to record. He produced their self-titled debut himself. Released in 2015, it’s an album built around their father’s death and dedicated in part to an older sister, Yanira, who had died two years earlier. A second album, Ash, followed in 2017 with guest spots from Kamasi Washington and Meshell Ndegeocello, and a third, Spell 31, arrived in 2022, its title and several of its songs drawn from passages in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Along the way the sisters appeared in the visual album for Beyoncé’s Lemonade and built a reputation, especially in Britain, as one of the more serious acts of the decade, heavy on harmony and heavier on ancestry.
Offering is their first album away from XL. They haven’t said publicly why they left after three records and more than 10 years with Russell, who produced or co-produced all of it; the new album comes out instead on their own label, IBEYI Records, distributed through AWAL. It also arrives after a stretch of years in which the sisters were largely based in different countries, a separation that goes back to the making of Spell 31. Part of the new record was written and filmed in Havana, in the city where their father once worked, a return both sisters have described as necessary before they could move forward with anything new. Naomi has talked about the album as a step into adulthood and self-assurance; Lisa-Kaindé has called it more of an exercise in trusting what comes next without knowing the shape of it yet.
The title marks the turn directly. Where Spell 31 was about invocation, calling on ancestral protection through magic words borrowed from an old text, Offering is built around the opposite idea: giving something up instead of asking for something back. Lisa-Kaindé has said the shift arrived almost literally, in a vision of Yemayá, the orisha of the sea, who told her she was done with spells and should make offerings from here on. The phrase became the album’s name and, more or less, its method.
That method plays out across 12 songs in under half an hour, almost none of them past three minutes. “Olokun” opens the record as little more than a short chant for two intertwined voices, named for the orisha who rules the ocean depths. “Aset” follows, and despite being framed as the album’s reach toward Egypt, it’s really an extension of ground the sisters had already opened on Spell 31: the song retells the story of the goddess Isis gathering forbidden knowledge to bring her dead lover back, here turned into a question about whether devotion that large ever gets repaid in kind. It was co-produced with the Haitian artist Michaël Brun. “Baba” addresses Elegguá, the orisha who opens roads, and moves by its end into something closer to a statement of independence than a request for one.
Elsewhere the sisters push further than they have before. “Moshpit” is the clearest case, a harder, more electronic track that would have sounded out of place on any earlier Ibeyi album and mostly works because the voices hold steady inside it rather than trying to match its aggression. “La tendresse d’un mot,” sung largely in French alongside the pianist Sofiane Pamart, slows things down into a quieter promise to stay the same while someone else changes, with a glancing line about how a public career complicates a private one. “I Know You Loved Me” works through a breakup in plainer terms, trust wearing down across the verses, while “Hurry Hurry” drops the mythology almost entirely for what amounts to a direct marriage proposal — the most unguarded thing on the record.
The shorter pieces, “Focus” and “The Process,” function more as connective tissue between the longer songs than statements in their own right, and “Lucky” closes the album quietly, bringing it back down to just the two of them, the way it began.
What holds the record together, more than any single producer or instrument, is that the voices never stop sounding like Ibeyi. They have reasserted themselves by writing most of this one as a duo, even while handing the instruments to other hands. The album is short enough that a couple of its quieter pieces pass before they fully land, and longtime listeners may miss hearing Naomi actually behind the drums rather than directing someone else toward them. But the record does what it sets out to do. It sounds like two people choosing, on purpose, to let go of something they had held onto for a decade, and discovering the sound holds up without it.
