Count the titles. “Favourite Girl”, the Diwali-riddim flip that took Song of the Year at the MOBOs and passed 360 million streams; “Focus On Me (All the Sexy Girls in the Club)”, built on P-Square; $exy Girl $ummer, the 2025 project; Fav Girl, the fashion label she spent the past year building while the music went quiet. Now “That Girl”. Darkoo has made one word do an enormous amount of work.
The reason is not branding. Born Oluwafisayo Isa in Lagos and raised in South London from the age of seven, Darkoo is openly gay and has been for years, and has said her sexuality turns up in the songs before it turns up in interviews. She has spoken about coming out to Nigerian parents who do not agree with her but love her anyway, and once answered a fan telling her to stop being a lesbian with a line too filthy to reprint. The girls in her catalogue are not a demographic. They are the subject.
Which makes the framing around “That Girl” – confidence, empowerment, self-belief – feel like a nervous translation. This is a courtship record. Darkoo’s refrain is plain wanting, and by the outro she is making her case: that she might be the one who changes this woman’s life, and would like to know whether she can have her. That is not a song about believing in yourself. It is someone trying their luck, which is a far better subject and a much older one.
Musically it does what she has quietly got very good at. The rhythm is loose Afroswing with gaps left in it, and her delivery sits in the half-sung register she has been refining since she stopped rapping full-time — flat, unbothered, faintly amused. The hook never pushes. It just repeats until you have it.
Asake cut his verse in a studio rigged up backstage, straight off his own London show, and it sounds like it: fast, warm, barely thought about. He does his usual thing, telling the woman she is fine and angling for a photograph, and it is charming. It is also, once you have registered what Darkoo is actually singing, quietly striking, two people courting the same woman on the same record, one of them the biggest Afrobeats star of the year, in a scene that has rarely made room for that arrangement.
The caveat is saturation. Asake has been on everything in 2026: the Wizkid EP, his own album, singles with BNXN, DJ Snake, Blaqbonez. His verses now arrive faster than they can land. This one survives, largely because it stays Darkoo’s song and he behaves like a guest in it.
It will be everywhere this summer. What it deserves is for someone to notice what it is about.
Watch the video for “That Girl” below or find the song on streamers.
